Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2022) (Patreon)

At their best, the films of the Dardenne brothers embody a critical realism. Part of what has made their work so powerful over the years, so original and affecting, is the way that they construct characters, particularly ones who live on society's margins or otherwise find their backs against the wall. The Dardennes, who might reasonably be considered Christian Marxists, have always taken great care to depict real people who exist at the intersection of sociology and psychology. A purely sociological cinema tends to regard such people as merely the sum total of their circumstances, events to which they react almost reflexively, whereas the usual psychology of bourgeois realism has assumed that character is primarily an interior construction. 

By contrast, the Dardennes have always given us films about individuals who are indeed under duress, often with no way out, but are never reducible to their victim status. The title character in Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) was of course responding to her dire situation -- a drug-addled mom, a belligerent landlord, etc. -- but at the same time her drive to secure employment was something more than functional. It was a mania, borne from her desperate need to not repeat the dead-end cycle of poverty. The main protagonist in The Son (Olivier Gourmet) was similarly driven, struggling to overcome his own trauma through an act so incongruous that, when asked by another character why he's doing it, he was forced to admit he did not know.

The Dardennes' last film, Young Ahmed, is one that many of the pair's fans vehemently rejected, arguing (implicitly or not) that these white Belgian men could not possibly have anything meaningful to say about a young Muslim (Idir Ben Addi) who has fallen under the sway of a radical Islamist imam. But the film itself says otherwise. While it is not nearly as rich as their earlier efforts, Young Ahmed provides its subject with a complicated interior life. Ahmed is grappling with anti-Arab racism, familial conflict, and the stirrings of sexual attraction, and clings to an inflexible version of Islam as a way to eradicate these complications, and notably, this attempt breaks down.

Tori and Lokita, meanwhile, is the first film I've seen by the brothers that seems to go out of its way to avoid lending its protagonists any unconscious desires, any interior conflicts -- anything, in short, that would detract from the film's whipped-dog victimology. Tori (Pablo Schils) is a young immigrant from Benin who was deemed a sorcerer and abandoned at an orphanage. His older "sister," Lokita (Mbundu Joely), may have rescued him, but more than likely the two of them simply met while being smuggled into Belgium and bonded as if they were blood relatives. In the opening scenes, we see Lokita being questioned by Immigration officials, who cannot allow her to stay because they rightly suspect she is not Tori's sister. Once the system has rejected Lokita, there is nothing left but abject misery, danger, and abuse.

Lokita is harassed by her mother back in Benin to send her money. She is also being shaken down by the thug (Marc Zinga) who smuggled them in. (He continues to insist that she "come to church," a directive presented so ominously that it could be a euphemism for some form of abuse.) And both kids are running drugs for Betim (Alban Ukaj), a cook at an Italian restaurant where the kids also do deliveries and sing karaoke. Betim allegedly arranges to secure fake papers for Lokita -- we have no way of knowing if he's ripping her off, and neither does she. But to pay this debt, she has to live in his grow-house for three months tending his weed crop. And this means no contact with Tori, something she finds understandably intolerable.

Even when faced with the most horrific circumstances, the kids evince near-total stoicism, and the Dardennes clearly intend this to convey their fortitude. But instead, Tori and Lokita renders them as almost blank slates, existing before us for the sole purpose of representing the hopeless plight of African immigrants in Europe. Even when Lokita is sexually assaulted, with Tori hiding under the bed, any emotional ramifications are quickly shrugged off. "I feel dirty," Lokita says, and Tori comforts her. "He's the one who did it. He should feel dirty." And that's that.

The trajectory of Tori and Lokita is determined from the very beginning and never swerves. Anyone they encounter, as far as the film shows us, treats them in the worst imaginable way. In their previous films, the Dardennes always allowed small glimmers of hope to shine through, even if they were ultimately not enough to offer redemption. (This is partly an effect of their cinematic engagement with Robert Bresson, and there is no trace of that at all in Tori and Lokita.) In the final scene, Tori eulogizes his sister but at the same time enunciates the film's entire message. "If Lokita had gotten papers, she would have been a caregiver. But she didn't, so now she's dead."

I can certainly understand it if the brothers have looked at the world of 2022 and decided that concepts like hope or transcendence are dishonest, simply distracting us from our dystopian social moment. But even allowing for that rationale, it's difficult to grasp what one is meant to take away from Tori and Lokita. It is obvious that we must improve the conditions in which people like these characters live. At the same time, this message would have been much more powerful if the film had allowed us to see who Tori and Lokita really are, instead of making their identities and aspirations purely theoretical. 

For decades, the Dardenne brothers have been uniquely empathetic, even radical artists, asking us to confront the Marxist dictum -- "we make history, but not in conditions of our own choosing." Tori and Lokita fails to live up to that legacy. It's the cinematic equivalent of an NGO fundraising pamphlet.