The Dardenne Brothers Offer Another Take on the Immigrant Experience

For more than 25 years now, the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, have been making devastating Belgian movies focused on hard-pressed individuals, from a working class mother fighting to keep her job to a disillusioned youth who sells his newborn baby. Their latest, “Tori and Lokita,” follows their tradition of quietly humane, realistically crafted, briskly plotted films, only this time there are two protagonists instead of one. Different, too, is the lack of a clear moral quandary in the characters, with a sense of probity surfacing more from their loyalty to each other than any challenging incident.The movie begins with a minutes-long closeup of Lokita as she’s interviewed by an immigration agent. She is being questioned about how she was able to find her younger brother Tori back in Benin, where he was living at an orphanage as a “sorcerer child,” the pejorative moniker given to those whose mothers die in childbirth. Lokita stumbles on some of the details, has an anxiety attack, and the interview is postponed for a later date. We soon meet Tori and come to realize the two are friends, not siblings, with Lokita hailing from Cameroon. A little later, we learn that their bond was formed while on a boat crossing to Italy from Africa, and that Tori was able to get Belgian resident papers quickly because of his persecuted status in Benin. At one point, Tori even tells an immigration officer that Lokita helped him escape the orphanage, a lie that reflects how deeply the early adolescent boy relies on the late-teenage girl to navigate life in an unfamiliar Belgian city.Such life generally involves making money any which way they can, including kicking off a local restaurant’s karaoke night, and selling marijuana and other drugs across town for its chef/owner. Although they live in a youth center, their need for cash stems from their debt to a pair of smugglers who brought them to Europe, and from Lokita’s desire to send money to her mother and real brothers back in Cameroon. Compromising situations that immigrants are often subjected to, such as sexual abuse and casual violence, are portrayed with the Dardennes brothers’ characteristic delicacy.When Lokita’s refugee status is denied, the movie splits into two narratives as she goes to work at a secluded marijuana-growing warehouse, where she has very little contact with the outside world, and Tori remains in the city. Yet their closeness — as strong as any brother-sister relationship — compels them to stay in touch, and when Tori figures out a way to get to her, they reunite. Together they decide to steal some of the marijuana stored at the grow house, and have Tori sell it by himself. From this point forward, the movie’s tension rises as the grim realities of their lives lead them to folly, which in turn hardens into tragedy.Although occasional stiffness appears in their performances, non-professionals Pablo Schils (as Tori) and Joely Mbundu (as Lokita) are pretty formidable actors. This stiffness could even be interpreted as the upright stance many immigrants adopt in order to appear as upstanding and law-abiding as possible. The rest of the cast barely makes an impression, and this insularity is one of the reasons why the film is not as ambitious as the brothers’ 2014 drama “Two Days, One Night” with Marion Cotillard, or as stirring as 2005’s “The Child.” This narrative isolation could be said to reflect, once again, Tori and Lokita’s outsider status. Yet as the director brothers demonstrated in their 1996 masterpiece “The Promise,” a story involving immigrants can encompass several different threads, including social critique, observations of native traditions, and, crucially, questions of personal responsibility.With its drug-related plotline and slight character development, “Tori and Lokita” at times can feel like episodic television, if not for its focus on two African emigrants. It also ends almost indifferently, with the final scene skirting the ramifications of the movie’s climax and presenting martyrdom as inevitable. Its blunt indictment of immigration policy aside, a song sung previously during a karaoke scene plays on the soundtrack as the credits roll. This ditty is called “Alla fiera dell’est,” which is an adaptation of the Seder folk song “Chad Gadya.” The exchange of language, ideas, and culture is the quintessence of immigration, and the Dardennes brothers’ use of the song is powerful in and of itself. What one remembers of the titular twosome singing the song in an early scene is how committed they were to helping each other as they sought a better life, all while singing an Italian tune based on a Hebrew song while in a French-speaking country.

The Dardenne Brothers Offer Another Take on the Immigrant Experience

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