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The Dardennes’ ‘Tori and Lokita’: Film Review | Cannes 2022

Tori and Lokita is possibly the saddest film writer-director-producers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have made yet — and that’s really something given we’re talking about the makers of The Promise, The Son, Lorna’s Silence, Two Days, One Night and of course past Palme d’Or winners Rosetta and The Child. But where so many of their films in the past concluded with at least a tiny sliver of solace, hope or grace piercing the social-realist gloom, Belgium’s preeminent filmmaking brothers are having none of that happy-clappy fluff this time time.

Set once again in a Podunk neighborhood near Liège and Condroz, the story revolves around two underage African immigrants (played by nonprofessionals Pablo Schils and Joely Mbundu) who are posing as siblings in order to secure the older Lokita permission to stay as a refugee. But the kids have been drawn reluctantly into the criminal underworld to pay debts and send desperately needed money back home. The most upbeat thing you could say about the film is that the tragedy it moves toward relentlessly — practically audible in the background like a speeding train — doesn’t kill off all the characters we’ve grown to love at the end.

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Tori and Lokita

The Bottom LineMasterfully crafted and unspeakably heartbreaking.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Pablo Schils, Joely Mbundu, Alban Ukaj, Tijmen Govaerts, Charlotte De Bruyne, Nadege Ouedraogo, Marc Zinga
Directors/screenwriters: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

1 hour 29 minutes

And yet this may be the Dardennes’ most emotionally engaging film in a while — a tragedy told with utter clarity, centered on protagonists entirely deserving of our sympathy, empathy, all the ‘pathies you’ve got. There’s no tincture of guilt or touch of moral ambiguity here, as there was with the central characters in The Unknown Girl or Young Ahmed. You’d think that might make this a more commercial vehicle for distributors, but alas the lack of name performers and reluctance of audiences to embrace stories about immigrants from non-European territories may make it a harder, not an easier, sell to distributors. That’s a whole other kind of tragedy.

Economical as always, the Dardennes kick off the story almost in medias res, with a lot of drama already done, dusted and absorbed into the characters’ background. The first long shot, making up the entirety of the first scene, observes Lokita (Mbundu), a young woman who’s maybe 15 or 16 years old at most, in close-up. The authorities are grilling her over the details of how she supposedly found her brother Tori (Schils) in a West African orphanage when he was 8 years old, despite not having seen him since he was a baby. Her face quivers with anxiety, presaging the panic attacks she has frequently throughout the film.

She can’t answer because it is indeed a lie. We eventually learn that the two, biologically unrelated and actually from two different countries (Cameroon and Benin), met while traveling to Europe together, became firm friends, and that Lokita may have saved Tori’s life at one point along the way. Tori seems to have already secured his permit to stay or is expecting to do so soon, perhaps because he’s a few years younger than Lokita or because his story of having been abandoned as a baby on suspicion of being a witch checked out.

Lokita is posing as his sister presumably because that gives her a better chance of staying with him; otherwise, she will be deported back home for being merely an economic migrant and not a refugee. For the moment, they are allowed to stay in a state-run center for migrant children, lightly supervised by social workers.

The film doesn’t really go into the details of how they got there and whether they deserve to stay or not, although it’s pretty clear the filmmakers are on the side of the kids. All we really need to know is that they are essentially good kids, honest and true to their word for each other, if not for the authorities, and deeply committed to looking out for each other with a ferocity few siblings by blood could match. That means they work together by night at a nearby Italian restaurant, encouraging the diners to use the karaoke machine by singing themselves. The highlight of their set is a duet with a haunting song in Italian they learned when taken into care in Italy. (The sweet, wistful, lullaby-style tune belies the brutal lyrics about progressively bigger animals eating smaller ones, making it an apt synecdoche for the film itself.)

After the singing, they have nightly rounds to do, delivering drugs all over the city for the chef downstairs, an Albanian criminal overlord named Betim (Alban Ukaj) who prepares the little packets of powder and grams of cannabis for the kids to courier when he’s not making up orders of spaghetti carbonara. Sometimes he gives the children some focaccia hot out of the oven to eat after one of their shifts. He also exploits Lokita sexually, giving her an extra 50 euros if she performs oral sex on him.

It’s not just the predatory European men the children have to look out for. Two Africans, a man and a woman, stalk Lokita around town, asking why she hasn’t been to church recently to see them and make the repayments she owes them for trafficking her and Tori across the Mediterranean. And her mother back home calls often to guilt-trip her into sending more money via wire service to pay for her five siblings’ education.

In desperation, Lokita agrees to take work as a “gardener” in a cannabis factory Betim owns that operates at an industrial site out of town. She is literally locked inside for a three-month imprisonment in a swelteringly humid environment, and warned that she should call a contact nearby in case of a fire. But the worst part about the situation is that she can’t have a phone to talk to Tori, so they can’t check up on each other’s safety.

Apart from the songs the kids sing, there is, as is often the case in a Dardennes film, no musical score to undertrack the action or set the mood so we know what’s coming. That makes the shocks all the more sudden and disturbing, and generally just ratchets up the tension. In an early scene, Tori bolts across the road to keep up with Lokita, and some cops pull him over for jaywalking, making the two especially nervous because they have drugs in their knapsacks. Apart from illustrating how cool these kids’ head are as they deal with cops as if there’s nothing amiss, it subtly makes us anxious about Tori’s road safety: Later, when he’s bombing around town on a rickety bicycle, viewers feel a constant low-level fear that he’s going to get in an accident that will keep him from seeing Lokita again.

The tension never really lets up, and carries through especially in a scene where Tori ingeniously tries to find out where Betim is keeping Lokita — a sort of MacGyver-style break-in scene worth of Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul but with no vintage needle drop in the background.

Such little touches of adventure are perhaps also meant as mild relief in a film that’s otherwise, let us not forget, unspeakably heartbreaking. But it works beautifully because, like some clever mousetrap in its own way, every detail, performance and bit of craftsmanship is executed with unfussy perfection. That goes as much for the production design by Dardennes regular Igor Gabriel, retuning DP Benoit Dervaux’s fluid camerawork, and Schils and Mbundu’s impeccable performances — turns that are understated but as emotionally true as compass needles pointing to true north.