Tori and Lokita Review: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne Give Up on the Hope of Redemption

The Dardennes don’t make room for kindness in the world of Tori and Lokita.

Tori and Lokita
Photo: Janus Films

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Tori and Lokita begins with a close-up on Lokita (Mbundu Joely) as the Beninese teenager is interrogated by a Belgian immigration official to determine the girl’s eligibility for resident papers. As the official focuses on Lokita’s relationship to a young boy, Tori (Pablo Schils), whom the girl claims is her brother, Lokita is briefly overwhelmed by the pressure of answering questions and sheds tears of frustration. This turns out to be one of the only times in the film that either Lokita or her younger companion express any emotion as they navigate the labyrinth of the immigration system, enduring abuses from authority figures and the members of an underground criminal world.

As soon becomes clear, the official’s skepticism toward the relationship between Tori and Lokita is justifiable: The two aren’t actually siblings, but whatever likely chance encounter threw them together resulted in them forming a fierce bond as they traveled across Europe. The film’s early segments elegantly hint at that shared past in glancing ways, as when Tori and Lokita perform an Italian song at a restaurant that they learned from a woman who briefly housed them in Paola. Joely and Schils’s understated performances work wonders during these early stretches, with the vibrant expression that they give to their characters’ intensely felt kinship saying more about where Tori and Lokita have been, and how they push forward, than any words.

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Soon, though, the film begins to subject its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation. In addition to being pressured by immigration officials, Lokita is forced to sell drugs for Betim (Alban Ukaj), the chef owner of the aforementioned restaurant, in order to pay her debts to the trafficker, Firmin (Marc Zinga), who smuggled her and Tori into the country. Lokita is also repeatedly sexually assaulted by Betim, who isolates her from Tori when she goes to work at an underground marijuana farm. Even Lokita’s mother back in Benin, never seen but forever hanging over the girl’s life, harasses her daughter to send back money to support her.

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Though it’s hinted that some of the people who Tori and Lokita encounter across the film were themselves exploited, they seem to exist only to inflict horror on the children. The Dardennes focus with almost perverse intensity on this suffering, which Tori and Lokita endure with a stoicism that turns the entire proceedings into something akin to a modern-day Stations of the Cross. This aligns with a general trend in the Dardennes’ work since they began to address the European migrant crisis with 2016’s The Unknown Girl, and it’s evident that the sharp uptick in xenophobia and nationalism across the continent in recent years has rattled the filmmakers.

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But their outrage has finally overwhelmed their signature humanism. In such films as 1999’s Rosetta, 2005’s L’Enfant, and 2011’s The Kid with a Bike, the filmmakers leaven grim truths with glimmers of hope. They also captured the pervasive effects of social neglect on their characters’ lives, including the practiced noninvolvement of moderates who offer empty sympathy with no commitment to actually fixing the problems of the less fortunate.

By contrast, the Dardennes don’t make room for kindness in the world of Tori and Lokita, as its main characters are only met with indifference or profound, galling hostility, from beatings to sexual humiliation. It’s not that these things don’t happen to undocumented migrants; indeed, they happen to them every day all over the world. But there’s a difference between pointing a finger at a cruel world and indulging in its abuses, as the unadulterated litany of horrors that Tori and Lokita endure prevents our being connected to their deeper needs. By defining them only as victims, the film leaves a caustic and self-defeating cynicism in its wake.

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Hollow in its provocation, Tori and Lokita’s obsession with the brutality of the world that its main characters inhabit reaches an apex in a coda that subjects them to one final, pitiless violation, before then having one character bluntly summarize the film’s theme of dehumanization and how it leads to loneliness and isolation. This ending’s didacticism only hammers home that the Dardenne brothers have, with Tori and Lokita, completely sacrificed the most essential quality of their most passionate and resonant work: the hope of redemption.

Score: 
 Cast: Mbundu Joely, Pablo Schils, Alban Ukaj, Marc Zinga, Charlotte De Bruyne, Tijmen Govaerts  Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne  Screenwriter: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne  Distributor: Sideshow  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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