Interview: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne on Tori and Lokita As a Social-Realist Fairy Tale

Over a quarter-century after their international breakthrough, La Promesse, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne remain standard-bearers of contemporary social-realist cinema. Their latest work of cinematic empathy, Tori and Lokita, won them a special 75th-anniversary prize at the Cannes Film Festival, which they can add to an extensive shelf of laurels from just that festival alone, including their rare dual Palme D’or prizes for Rosetta and L’Enfant.

Tori and Lokita caps off a recent run of films, including The Unknown Girl and Young Ahmed, revolving around the marginalization and mistreatment of non-white immigrants in the Dardenne brothers’ native Belgium. These films brim over with righteous indignation and, especially in Tori and Lokita, tragedy. The young African migrants at the center of this film formed a makeshift safety net for one another in the absence of blood relatives on their journey to Europe. While state institutions and criminal enterprises alike try to disrupt their solidarity, the bond of preservation and protection between Tori (Pablo Schils) and Lokita (Mbundu Joely) persists through financial exploitation and modern-day slavery in the drug trade.

I spoke with the Dardennes in New York ahead of the American release of Tori and Lokita, which also recently screened as part of MoMI’s First Look 2023 and the IFC Center’s one-week retrospective of their work. Our conversation covered where the film fits in with their work at large, why the story resembles a fairy tale, and how the brothers realize their naturalistic visuals.

Editor’s Note: The interview responses below contain spoilers about the film.

Do you see your films as part of a larger body of work on any of your other major themes or subjects?

Luc Dardenne: It’s an ensemble of marginalized people, whether they’re day laborers, drug addicts, or immigrants. When we started with day laborers, they were already on the margins because they were also unemployed, and therefore we see them as marginalized people. It’s people that are locked into a place where they can’t really have a normal life and are forced to be marginalized. Whether it’s Rosetta, in terms of society, or The Kid with a Bike, [where the kid was left by the] father, they’re stuck in a place that keeps them on the margin.

Are you thinking about the echoes between the films as you’re creating them, or is it just something that you only realize afterward?

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: I think it’s both because we have certain obsessional interests, and there are not a lot of them. If we’re filming Tori and Lokita, it’s connected in the sense that these are our focus and obsessions. But we’re not thinking while we’re doing it, “Oh, does this have some kind of relationship with the previous films and is there continuity involved?” We’re not doing it for that. Each time, we really try to have our characters be people. Whether it’s Tori and Lokita, Rosetta, or Igor in La Promesse, we want them to be people, not symbols of what is going on.

There have been immigrants and refugees in your films back to even La Promesse, but it feels much more prominent in your most recent three films released beginning in 2016. Is this a response to the refugee crisis in Europe?

JPD: In La Promesse, Igor and Roger were white immigrants. Now, it’s Black immigrants from Africa, so that’s a difference. It’s true that since—and maybe even a little bit preceding—La Promesse, we started to get a lot of migrants from the Middle East and Africa. And the question was how are we going to handle that, and Europe has had difficulty handling it aside from barbed wire or camps. We’re not on the level of what should be done to be able to do something. I’m not saying that it’s simple. It’s complicated, but it’s a big issue.

Beyond that, these non-white characters have moved from the sidelines to being at the center of the action. Has your focus changed along with the times?

LD: It’s true that in The Unknown Girl, a Black girl comes to the door and then she’s sexually abused and killed by Bryan’s father. But critics and people didn’t really pick up on the fact that she was Black and that this happened to her. They spoke about the doctor and other elements and other characters in the film, but they didn’t really focus on it. That was important, and now in Tori and Lokita, Black individuals are at the center. They’re the protagonists.

Does that prove the point of The Unknown Girl if audiences also ignore the titular character’s plight?

JPD: [laughs] Maybe!

You’ve mentioned that Tori and Lokita has some elements of a fairy tale. How do you map these people and scenarios onto those archetypes and conventions to give them this larger meaning?

LD: It’s true that there are elements of the fairy tale in the sense that you have the two abandoned kids that have no parents, the girl that is locked in her castle—which is not a castle but a marijuana plant—and then the kid who comes and saves her. Of course, then they kill her, so the bad guy wins in the end. But then, there is the song that redeems it at the end. In The Kid with a Bike, there you have a real fairy godmother that comes and basically saves him. Here, the kids are very alone. In fact, of all the characters we’ve created, these are the most alone. In The Kid with a Bike, yes, he gets up at the end, but we feel it’s really Samantha’s love that saves him, so it is a fairy godmother that does ultimately save him. We weren’t able to do that with this film. The only semblance of a fairy godmother in Tori and Lokita, I would say, is the audience because they are unable to accept this unjustified death of Lokita.

When you’re thinking about narrative events like a murder that are occurrences outside of the normal daily lives of these marginalized people, how do you incorporate them without making the moments feel like a dramatic contrivance?

JPD: I’m going to stay precise and concrete about what you’re asking and only talk about the fact that Lokita gets killed. We never envisioned any other ending for the film. One of them had to die. In terms of matching the indignation that we felt when we read the article that originally launched our wanting to do the film, which revolted us, we felt that one of them had to go. It actually matches reality. That is what happens. The fact that she is killed, it’s almost as if she then owns her death. By dying, in a way, she’s saving Tori’s life.

From the opening shot, Lokita is framed in a tight close-up that you’ve talked about as being akin to imprisonment. And Tori seems to be shot lower in the frame, a little bit freer by contrast. Is that a motif you were looking to establish?

LD: It’s true that Lokita, from the get-go, is imprisoned within the frame. Tori actually is also imprisoned, but he’s able to break out of the frame and come out of it. Lokita is heavier. She falls. She absorbs hits. But Tori bounces. It gives us a feeling that he’s always going to find a solution. But unfortunately, at the end, he doesn’t.

When in your process can you start to map these themes in your story to visual representations?

LD: It’s there from the beginning but, at the same time, not really. Otherwise, it’s not worth making the movie. It’s a work in progress! Things develop, and they grow thanks to Joely and Pablo. It’s in the script. It’s in the rehearsals. It’s in the shoot. Thanks to Joey and to Pablo. We knew from the get-go that we were going to do the first frames and the first shot of Lokita the way we did it. When she had her eyes covered in the car, the way we would close the door and she would be locked in her cell with the bed and food, the way she was in the marijuana plant…that all was like she was in jail. Then he’s out in nature, skipping around in the trees [laughs].

How much of the visual aesthetic is dictated by practical factors like the height difference between Joely and Pablo?

LD: We had originally envisioned Lokita as a tall girl, if not as tall as Joely. When we found [Joely], we ended up with a tall girl. We knew that Tori needed to be on the petite side because, for instance, he had to hide in the car. We had to have somebody who could fit there.

Do you have more freedom in filming when you aren’t dealing with those kinds of constraints? The example that I always think of with composition in your work is Two Days, One Night where you have those objects splitting the frame between Marion Cotillard’s Sandra and her co-workers.

JPD: It’s not the same for this film. We had to keep them to the utmost within the same frame. And that wasn’t always easy because if one of them was not active at that point, we had to find a way to bring activity to the frame. Whether it was a look or something else like that. We did have that constraint within the frame, but we felt it was very important to keep them within the frame because it underscored their [connection] and their relationship. We had to keep that going.

In order to make these long sequences shots look so effortlessly naturalistic, it requires a lot of blocking and choreography. Has this gotten easier over time as people are more used to cameras being everywhere?

LD: In this case, it was not easier. It was more difficult because we were dealing with two actors who had never acted before. We had to bring a lot to the work in the beginning. We had to infuse it with more. When Tori is coming to the marijuana plant for the second time and he’s jumping over things, running through the field, climbing over things, that part was not difficult.

But when you had both Tori and Lokita in the room together, or when they were at the bus stop together, that took more work and was more complicated. When they’re at the bus stop and they’re discussing how much money they should give to the smuggler [played by Marc Zinga] and maybe that he should sell some drugs on the side, you have to find movements to go with that. And that was not initially so easy. That came with the rehearsals.

The shoots were much easier than the rehearsals. Or, for instance, when Tori’s in the kitchen and realizes that he didn’t take the money out of the pizza box, and he goes and gets the euros, then he lines them up against the counter, there was a little bit of an issue there. It was a little early because the guy was still cooking. So, he laid the kids and things on the counter, and then he put them one on top of the other. Pablo found a way to fill the time. The only thing that we had to say was: “You can’t go past this point.” He knew that there was a little bit of a lapse in time, and he found a way to fill the time. We said, “Bravo!”

You’ve said that you hope the film changes people’s minds about these kinds of situations for the marginalized. Do you feel that this task of inspiring empathy, and perhaps action, is a harder task given the state of the world?

JPD: It’s true that we’re enormously solicited with what to look at. Maybe it’s harder now to take the time to just stop. Let me really look at this one film.

Translation by Dominique Borel.