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

46/100

Exactly the sort of programmatic miserabilism that these guys had always taken gratifying care to avoid. All isn't yet lost—when the film focuses on Tori's resourceful efforts to find his semi-voluntarily imprisoned "sister," watching him craftily manipulate various adults ("I don't like to lie to her," she stoically says of a woman at the care facility where he lives, "but in this case I had to") and burrow his way through multiple levels/layers of the illicit weedhouse, it boasts that classic Dardenne Brothers tension. Lokita, however, is little more than a repository of impending doom: teenage drug runner and effectively enforced sex worker (her "consent" is always under duress), hounded and at one point robbed by the coyote who smuggled her across the Italian border, struggling to send money back home to a mother who's not just ungrateful but accuses her of holding out, and subject to stress-triggered panic attacks that cause her to collapse. There's none of the thorny moral reckoning that distinguishes the Dardennes' best work (and even a film like Young Ahmed, which I liked less than this one but respect more). It's just a superficially grim depiction of how brutal life can be for undocumented immigrants, especially those from African nations. Granted, my strong preference for dramatic complexity, even when it comes to subjects involving the dispossessed, has become unfashionable; all the same, it's dispiriting to see world-class filmmakers head in the opposite direction. Dept. of Time Keeps On Slippin' Slippin' Slippin': I was startled to discover that it's been so long since The Kid With a Bike that Thomas Doret, who played that film's title character, has a one-line role here as an attorney. Ye gods.