Joely Mbundu as Lokita and Pablo Schils as Tori, both confronting intolerable menace
Tori and Lokita (2022)
"Please sir, I want some more."
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
— William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"
The boy, Tori (Pablo Schils), is 12 years old but looks younger. The girl, Lokita (Joely Mbundu), is 17 and also looks younger.
They tell the world they’re brother and sister, but this is a desperately crafted, shrewdly enacted lie.
Both Black Africans, she from Benin, he from Cameroon, they’ve been smuggled through Italy into modern Belgium.
They’re two child migrants struggling to gain that step up to the still far from tranquil status of “immigrant”. That is, legal, employable, “free”.
Because Tori has spent time in an Italian orphanage which has a record of him, he can partly claim that legal designation, so the Belgian government has granted him official “papers”.
Can he be employed? Not legally. He’s a child, so for money he has to work off-the-books, underground or both.
Lokita is in more jeopardy. She and Tori concocted the brother-sister ruse to improve Lokita’s chances to get “papers”.
She lies to authorities saying she and Tori were at the same orphanage. But her falsifications don’t add up, so immigration officers refuse to give her “papers”.
She’s allowed to work. But she can’t train, as she hopes, to be a “home help” aide.
The bogus brother and sister now share a small room in a shelter, eking out an existence.
They both toil for ruinously low wages in a grungy restaurant, sometimes sweetly singing together for the customers to earn a few extra coins.
Endlessly strapped for cash, they sing for coins in a restaurant that exploits them
They can’t survive on what they pull in. To sustain themselves they’ve fallen into working for a drug network run by a ruthless gang.
The restaurant chef, in league with the drug ring, recruited them.
Often, as Tori delivers “food” from the restaurant, he’s actually supplying customers with drugs.
Stifling her terror and repulsion, Lokita gains an extra 50 euros when she submits to sexually servicing the chef.
If that weren’t enough travail, another gang plagues her. The Black human traffickers who smuggled her and Tori into Belgium keep demanding money from her.
If she doesn’t fork it over, they beat her.
Hence the pair’s urgent subterfuge. If Lokita can convince Belgian authorities she was in the same orphanage as Tori, she’ll get her “papers”.
Failing that and trying to send money to her family in Benin, she takes a job – more like indentured servitude – tending marijuana plants at a remote, windowless location.
Living and working alone, she profoundly misses Tori, and sure enough, by stealth, he finds her.
The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, co-writers and co-directors on this and many other movies, here rely on a stark, harrowing realism that has venerable roots not just in movies but in literature.
For sure, this picture’s techniques are cinematic. It speeds by in 88 shivery minutes, like the work of two snap-shooting paparazzi, every frame breathing “Scandal!”
Its approach is realistic, local and modern. We believe we’re in today’s Belgium. And its final segment turns into a tense, torturous thriller.
But the movie doesn’t have a social protest agenda. It’s so visceral and immediate it rattles our nerves before we can even form a clear protest.
Quite to the contrary, its pain overwhelms like a sudden cosmic revelation, as if without warning we’re beholding a tiny amoeba or a glimmering far-off star.
Oliver Twist dared to “want” more porridge, and for that outrageous request got himself bound to cruel servitude under a callous undertaker.
We need to remember that in showing us the plight of Oliver, David Copperfield, Pip and other forlorn young characters, Dickens (1812-1870) was dramatizing not just poverty but the helplessness of poor children.
I maintain that our very notion of “child poverty” had its birth in Dickens.
In this movie, Lokita pleads to her drug-dealing handler: “I want to talk to Tori.”
In reply she – a direct descendant of Dickens’ Oliver – gets a stinging slap and is warned she’ll get it again whenever she utters the word “want”.
Dickens would have understood. It becomes clear that Tori and Lokita have only each other for salvation. No system, above or below the law, is coming to their aid.
The result feels terrifyingly firsthand. In any scene, I invite you to try taking your eyes off them. Every second you believe they’re in actual danger.
Tori and Lokita is a triumph of movie realism, that is, it raises brute facts to the level of alarming, bell-clanging truth.
In his poem, Blake (1757-1827) insists that the lives of any of us are bound up with the fate of all of us.
The vast and the minuscule aren’t distinct categories, but two ways of looking at a single all-embracing truth.
Heaven may be, as Blake would have it, “all in a Rage” at the ghastliness Tori and Lokita undergo.
But the Dardenne brothers leave it to us to spot the Toris and Lokitas among us.
These frightened children cannot, dare not, speak for themselves. This movie shows us what awaits them if they do.
And it’s not only white Belgians who torment them. Dehumanizing racism can infect anyone.
The Black smugglers who brought them to Belgium continue to demand money, meting out brutality without any sense of Black “comradeship” or “solidarity”.
We watch in raw closeup as lawless exploiters inflict their calculated cruelty on the exploited.
And these exploiters aren’t rolling in dough. On the social ladder they’re only one viciously maintained rung above the exploited.
This is a dire, deadly struggle, and I can’t sum up what Schils and Mbundu accomplish here as “acting”.
Tori and Lokita plan their next move, sizing up the formidable odds against them
Of course, it is acting. They’re performers who remain magnificently rapt for the camera during truly harrowing moments.
And their laughter and pain feel drawn from within themselves, not imposed by their directors.
But beyond skillful self-watchfulness, both young actors project a vulnerability that I can’t imagine any director spelling out for them.
It comes before us, and we absorb it without resisting.
How the brothers communicated to them the script’s fraught urgency I have no idea.
But you won’t fail to notice these nonprofessional young performers’ sheer bravado.
What’s written across their faces when Tori and Lokita are beaten, lied to and exploited seems to be summoned from their inner resources as performers, not prodded from them.
The result feels terrifyingly firsthand. In any scene, I invite you to try taking your eyes off them. Every second I felt they were in actual danger.
Tori and Lokita is a triumph of movie realism, that is, it raises brute facts to the level of alarming, bell-clanging truth.
I’m willing to bet that, like me, you won’t know what to do with yourself when the lights come up and it’s over.
It may be over, but it’s not done with you.