The Dardennes craft a bleeding-heart sequel to Bambi.
We’re introduced to the two black African teenagers of the Dardenne brothers’ film Tori and Lokita as they are trapped in the immigration maze and cruel drug-dealing world of Millennial Belgium. The older teen, tall female Lokita (Joely Mbundu), and the short, younger male Tori (Pablo Schils) share a sweet emotional bond. Not actually siblings, they journeyed north together and nurture each other — singing shared lullabies and cagily speaking up for their mutual well-being amid the bureaucracies and weed-selling underworld of a new foreign home.
Tori and Lokita rouses the same sentimentality expressed by the media class who report the Biden-administered invasion at the U.S. southern border only as a “humanitarian crisis.” The Dardennes’ film style — contrasting goodness with undeniable oppression — is bracingly naturalistic and emotionally precise as usual, but they apply the same high-minded schmaltz. Can enlightened Americans see through it?
The Cannes Film Festival has crowned the Dardenne brothers with two Palmes d’Or and additional prizes as confirmation of the Belgian duo’s sensitivity to Europe’s ongoing colonial crises. That’s the Dardennes’ métier, and it complements the unofficial uniparty sympathy that hoodwinks some Americans (the media, churches, and various NGOs), preventing them from separating pity and politics.
In the opening scene, we witness the real-time complications of Lokita as she undergoes immigration interrogation. Her physiological frailties — recurring panic attacks — stem from the emotional and sexual affronts she suffers from government officials and her drug exploiters. It’s impossible to feel distanced from this: Lokita could be any clear-eyed youth approaching womanhood, and eager Tori carefully combs a part in his hair to appear the neat little gentleman, presentable to the world. They play on our most basic sympathies. Their innocence accuses our cynicism. But who’s to blame?
The plight that unfolds in Tori and Lokita elicits pathos like that in Vittorio De Sica’s post-WWII classic Shoeshine (about two street urchins separated by the ravages of war). But instead of discovering a human tragedy, the Dardennes calculate our sorrow. We watch these pathetic kids from Benin — quick-witted workers who easily adapt to new tasks — and admire their disarming facility with both French and Italian, though they’re worried about losing their mother tongue, Bariba. They’re forced to become drug couriers to send money to their families in Africa while we simply wait as the Dardennes play out their dour fates. (Fascinating detail: They’re also preyed upon by older African con artists.) Not even Lokita’s memory of their cultural background, where Tori was said to be one of the “sorcerer” children at an orphanage, gives providence that shields them from Europe’s depravity.
Few filmmakers can match the Dardenne brothers’ simple vision and adroit craftsmanship. Each social perception seems assured, a measure of the modern moment and of colonialism’s consequence. Observing the black Africans and the white Europeans as products of history enriches the Dardennes’ post-neorealist humanism. But they have not advanced beyond their breakthrough film La Promesse (1996), in which a black African woman came to Europe seeking the fate of her emigrant husband and endured a chain of humiliations. Similarly, this film’s unremitting bleakness tries one’s patience as well as one’s political optimism.
The Dardenne brothers are smart; Pierre studied drama, Jean-Luc studied philosophy, and they balance each other’s gifts. Yet they’re not so smart that they can keep Tori and Lokita from offending our natural skepticism regarding immigration and invasion, and about the media’s exasperating practice of promoting the PC word “migrant” in place of “illegal alien.” The issue makes us wary — whether it’s in James Gray’s The Immigrant, which indulges a mawkish story of white European relocation, appealing to melting-pot sentimentality without the moral rigor of Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II; or it’s in Tori and Lokita, where the focus on the exploitation of African innocents to facilitate Europe’s vices is merely a soft Marxist critique.
Watching earnest Lokita enslaved to a drug cartel, deprived of a fulfilling womanhood, while resourceful Tori, working his heart out, riding a bike bigger than himself, merely appeases bleeding-heart sanctimony. The Dardennes’ latest sentimental view of the Other amounts to politicized anthropomorphism — even the title Tori and Lokita sounds like a woke Disney cartoon about darling forest creatures. Yes, the film is heartrending, but no more so than a progressive’s version of Bambi.
