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‘Tori and Lokita’ Review: Precarious Lives in Exile
In the new movie from the Dardenne brothers, two underage African migrants struggle to make a home in an unkind land.Like most of the films from the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, their latest — the harrowing “Tori and Lokita” — is a story about outcasts. And like most their films, it too is a suspense thriller about moral conscience, one that takes place in and around a gray, Belgian city. There, two young African migrants are struggling to make a home in an unkind world in which nearly every human exchange is transactional and carries the threat of betrayal.Tori and Lokita — played by Pablo Schils and Joely Mbundu, both appealing nonprofessionals — are living at a gently chaotic children’s center and passing as brother and sister; they’re also in limbo. Tori, a young-looking 12, has his residency papers, but the 17-year-old Lokita hasn’t yet been granted hers. Faced with the specter of Lokita’s deportation, the two are intensely focused on finding a way for her to stay in the country. They pore over her story, rehearsing what she should tell immigration officers, all while trying to dodge the smugglers whom they owe money and running orders for a local (illegal) cannabis dealer.The movie opens with Lokita in the middle of an immigration interview, the camera fixed on her in close-up — for two progressively uneasy minutes — as she responds to offscreen questions. Her face and voice are composed at first, her answers a touch canned, though everything shifts when the interviewer challenges her story. Because there are no cutaways to the questioner, your gaze, your focus, remains on Lokita, compelling you to keep looking even as the queries keep coming and she begins to crumble and then to cry, her testimony and self-possession undone by the soft droning of dehumanizing power.The interrogation is uncomfortable to watch, which is the point. The Dardennes aren’t simply forcing you to see Lokita, to see her bravery and tremulous vulnerability, they are also making you a witness to state violence. The story’s most conspicuous villains are the drug dealer and his gang as well as the smugglers, all of whom hound and exploit the children relentlessly, demanding money and, in the case of the dealer, worse from Lokita. Yet, as the movie underscores, the larger fault here lies with a country — and by extension, its people — that treats migrants so inhumanely (some worse than others).The interview is stopped, and the scene wraps up quickly — there’s a cut to some anxious white faces — and Tori and Lokita are soon regrouping and rushing, always rushing, toward their next move. They falter and stumble, moments of difficulty that the Dardennes intersperse with scenes of tender intimacy that fill in their back story and other interludes that insistently remind you that, however independent and resourceful the pair may seem, these are children. When Tori asks an immigration officer, “Why can’t my sister have her papers?,” the Dardennes (who aren’t above jerking tears) keep the camera at the boy’s level.However unvarnished the Dardennes’ movies appear, however seemingly plain and obvious, their approach is refined, and the movies themselves are highly stylized. The stories tend to be fairly simple and feature naturalistic dialogue, nondescript locations and marginalized young characters; and it’s crucial to underline that Tori and Lokita are their first Black protagonists. The precarity of the lives that the Dardennes explore give the stories feeling and tension while their directorial choices — including where they put the camera and how they situate characters in the world — give their work its characteristic ethical politics.The story takes a turn, narratively and tonally — the rhythms seem to quicken or at least your pulse does — after another of Lokita’s immigration interviews goes badly. The dealer offers to get her counterfeit papers, if she works at a cannabis grow house tending the plants out in the boonies. She does, and there, cut off from Tori in this sprawling, windowless space, she waters and fertilizes the plants and is supplied basic necessities by indifferent minders. Lokita has effectively become a prisoner while the more resourceful Tori continues to scramble in the outside world, a bleak situation that mirrors their respective immigration statuses.Time and again in the Dardennes’ movies, imperiled and isolated characters are saved — by themselves, by others — in moments that express the filmmakers’ humanism. It’s easy to imagine or, really, hope that something similar will happen in “Tori and Lokita,” a possibility that starts to seem more and more like magical thinking, particularly given how abjectly African migrants are often treated. Surely, you think, someone decent will step up to offer help. What I didn’t grasp when I first watched the movie is that the act of grace I was anxiously waiting for had happened before the movie began. Lokita had once saved Tori; they saved each other. Yet in a world as barbaric as this one, who else is willing to step up?Tori and LokitaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘The Worst Ones’ Review: The Gazes of Children
In their feature, the directors Lisa Akoka and Romane Gueret build a provocative critique of filmmaking practices.A freckled girl, Maylis (Mélina Vanderplancke), sits in a classroom that has been turned into a casting venue. Her gaze could be described as apathetic were it not for the way she challenges Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh), a fictional filmmaker, at the start of the keen drama “The Worst Ones,” from Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret. Those two real directors’ movie follows Gabriel as he films in an economically depressed neighborhood in Northern France. That Gabriel gives Maylis a nonspeaking role speaks volumes.The faces of Vanderplancke and the other nonprofessional actors here are memorable, as are their gazes. And this is one the conceits of Akoka and Gueret’s movie (which they wrote with Eléonore Gurrey): a gaze can resist objectification.The title comes from Maylis’s shrewd observation about whom Gabriel intends to cast — and why. Maylis is one of four youngsters the filmmaker and his assistant hire. He casts Lily (Mallory Wanecque), struggling with grief after her brother’s death, as the lead, a pregnant 15-year-old. Gabriel chooses the pint-size brawler Ryan (Timéo Mahaut) to be Lily’s little brother. Ryan has found a haven with his sister, Mélodie (a terrific Angélique Gernez). Also cast: Jessy (Loïc Pech), an initially cocky and grateful 17-year-old.Gabriel’s interest in marginalized children is authentic, if exploitative. Akoka and Gueret get at that tension by widening their focus to include their character’s lives, as well as glimpses of a wisely wary community.Luminously photographed and nimbly edited, “The Worst Ones” — which won the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 — offers a provocative critique of filmmaking practices. It also presents a subtle defense of the onscreen miracles revealed by the young and the raw.The Worst OnesNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Petite Solange’ Review: Coming of Age as Your Parents Divorce
Axelle Ropert’s carefully calibrated film from France follows a girl experiencing the pain of having to accept her parents as people with faults.Early in the French film “Petite Solange,” four family members make eye contact with one another in turn in a measured series of close-ups. It’s a quiet expression of intimacy, and the moment establishes their balance and bond as a group. It also illustrates the compassionate gaze of the writer-director, Axelle Ropert, who spins a conventional divorce story into a focused melodrama about the loneliness of youth.Ropert filters the film’s events through the experience of Solange (Jade Springer), a precocious girl on the brink of adolescence. Her parents are in the arts — Aurélia (Léa Drucker) is a stage actress and Antoine (Philippe Katerine) runs a musical instruments shop — and Solange relishes spending time with them in their creative work spaces. Delight gives way to despair, however, once the couple starts fighting and Solange witnesses her home steadily turn from a safe haven into a conflict zone. Jarred by this new reality, Solange retreats socially, and Ropert captures her dejection in a pair of vivid sequences set after sundown in Nantes, where the family lives.The director allows her protagonist’s pain to protract and pulsate without narrative fuss; even scenes of turmoil unspool with a deliberate delicacy. Sometimes, a sentimental score distracts from the careful images. But as Solange’s teenage woes bubble up and then cool to a simmer, Ropert reveals a knack for calibrating emotion. It can be agony to accept one’s parents as people with needs and faults all their own, and Ropert observes Solange’s coming-of-age lucidly and without judgment.Petite SolangeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘A Good Person’ Review: Zach Braff’s New Chapter
The filmmaker behind “Garden State” has created a fully drawn female character in Florence Pugh’s grieving addict. But this recovery drama often has too heavy a hand.An interesting litmus test of the shift in our zeitgeist’s consideration of female characters — or of female agency at large — exists in the space between the release of Zach Braff’s “Garden State” in 2004 and the reconstituted consensus around the film in the next decade.The movie remains a charming piece of mid-aughts indie quirkism, but over the years its character Sam, played by Natalie Portman, became emblematic of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope: a hollow tool, conjured by purportedly sensitive male indie fantasies, to help the protagonist on his journey toward self-actualization. That isn’t the case with “A Good Person,” Braff’s latest film. Its strongest quality, in fact, is how fully embodied and how human Florence Pugh is as the grieving Allison, a woman who is undone by a car accident that kills her sister- and brother-in-law-to-be.Yet, there’s another storytelling mechanism Braff has repurposed and coarsely dialed up. Like “Garden State,” in which Andrew (Braff, who wrote and directed the film) has been medicated and stuck his entire life after being involved in the accident that killed his mother, “A Good Person” sees Allison suffocated by guilt and desperately seeking to escape herself through opioids.Soon, she falls into addiction, a downward spiral the film handles quickly. After Allison hits rock bottom, she goes to an A.A. meeting, where she bumps into Daniel (Morgan Freeman), whose son she had planned to marry and whose daughter died in the crash. Daniel, a recovering alcoholic whose sobriety is being tested as he struggles to raise his granddaughter on his own, has always blamed Allison, who was driving the car, for the crash. The unlikely bond Pugh and Freeman create becomes the beating heart of the film, and there is rich emotion in Allison and Daniel’s shared struggles as they sketch the contours of their pain to each other.Allison’s sparkling life before and her descent after the accident are written with such a heavy hand and confused tone, however, that much of the film reads as a crassly manufactured setup for the arc of redemption and healing that follows. A climactic moment at a party involving Allison’s and Daniel’s sobriety is so bizarre and overwrought, you might find yourself shocked to learn it’s not a dream sequence.Braff is going for something broader than indie naturalism, so perhaps the film calls for less subtle brushstrokes. But the result is something that rings with far less thoughtfulness than he’s clearly capable of (particularly in light of the opioid crisis that the film mentions), despite Pugh’s remarkable attempts to ground the story.This isn’t to say that “A Good Person” is disingenuous: Braff wrote the script while wrestling with the deaths of several loved ones in the last few years. But the film would do better understanding that its core sufferings, of mourning and of self-blame, are dramatic enough. Instead it gets lost in raising the stakes to center a big-hearted tale of recovery. The real story is in the quiet moments, where the silence of grief hangs palpably between Allison and Daniel, ever-present and consuming.A Good PersonRated R for drug abuse, language throughout, and some sexual references. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Walk Up’ Review: Good Friends Make Bad Neighbors
Hong Sang-soo’s latest film traces the relationships in a small Seoul apartment building as they evolve and grow heavier with complications.Just five months after the theatrical release of “The Novelist’s Film,” the fantastically prolific filmmaker Hong Sang-soo offers “Walk Up,” an equally spare and melancholy study of the small moments that define a life. A conversation falters. Another bottle is opened. Three people share drinks and their universe is completely reordered.More than most filmmakers, Hong makes movies that benefit from being considered as pieces of a much greater whole. Since the mid-90s, he has directed more than 30, and each I’ve seen tells a talky, minor-key tale of life at the borders of art and self, of relationships and time, set among a sophisticated subset of Seoul’s contemplative class. Think Eric Rohmer but with a lot more Soju.“Walk Up” follows suit, a simple but not simplistic portrait in black-and-white, tracing the relationships in a small Seoul apartment building as they evolve and grow heavier with complications. At the center is a successful filmmaker, Byungsoo (Kwon Haehyo), who brings his semi-estranged daughter, Jeongsu (Park Miso), to a boozy meeting with an old friend (Lee Hyeyoung) who owns the building. With hindsight, the meeting seems to alter the course of Byungsoo’s life, from triumph toward tragedy. But as Hong shows, the seeds of Byungsoo’s undoing were there all along. Tragedy arrives often by drips, failures by slow accretion.Like many great artists, Hong appears in some ways to be trying to tell the same story over and over, each new film an attempt to solve the same essential riddle about what makes us tick. Just as well. For decades, Giorgio Morandi painted almost nothing but bottles and vases. What sublime and subtle insights arise from the variations!Walk UpNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘The Lost King’ Review: A Royal Obsession
Sally Hawkins lights a fire under this droll dramedy about the search for the final resting place of Richard III.Sally Hawkins is a gift, to directors and audiences alike. When she smiles, it’s a face-splitting beam, so contagious that we would likely love her even if she were playing a murderer. And while her character in “The Lost King” is firmly tethered to a dead man, she didn’t kill him: She’s trying to dig him up.As Philippa Langley, the single mother from Edinburgh who, in 2012, spearheaded the successful search for the grave of King Richard III, Hawkins lends wings to this otherwise languid dramatic comedy. In a transformative moment, Philippa attends a production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and becomes mesmerized by the handsome actor playing the King (Harry Lloyd). This could easily have read as romantic attraction; but as Zac Nicholson’s camera zooms in on Hawkins’s wonderfully unguarded features, we see instead the stirring of a mission, one that will upend her life and alter history: to find Richard’s grave and disprove his reputation as a hunchbacked nephew-killer and unworthy usurper.That’s a tall order for a dissatisfied woman who suffers from chronic illness and whose ex-husband (played by Steve Coogan, who wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope) is only marginally more tolerant than her co-workers. Yet Philippa, small and sensitive and herself a little lost, feels an affinity with the maligned monarch, gobbling up history books and finding common cause with the Richard III Society, whose members have long wondered if Richard’s twisted mind and body were fictions concocted by the Tudors and corroborated by Shakespeare. Let’s find out!Coogan and Pope, working once again with the director Stephen Frears (the alliance that brought us the unexpectedly moving “Philomena” in 2013), have shaped Philippa’s story into an easily digestible underdog tale. Vulnerable yet adamant, Philippa bulldozes bureaucrats and scientists into supporting her plan to excavate the parking lot where she believes the King is buried. She’s an immovable force, a battering ram of niceness, and Frears (now 81, and with a stunningly varied back catalog) is beguiled by the wonder of her tenacity and intuition. Her occasional chats with Richard’s ghost might be a sugar cube too far; but the movie’s sweetness is cut with enough acid — including subversive digs at academic pomposity and rampant sexism — that it never becomes cloying.Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, “The Lost King” isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones. Those quibbling about factual liberties may be missing the point: This is a movie that’s less about rehabilitating a monarch than reinvigorating a life.The Lost KingRated PG-13 for a few cheeky words. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘The Five Devils’ Review: The Scent of the Past
Part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, the uncanny second feature by Léa Mysius follows a young girl with a magical sense of smell.Vicky (Sally Dramé), the creepy kid at the center of “The Five Devils,” has a strange power: her sense of smell is so strong, she can track her mother, Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulous), from dozens of yards away with her eyes closed; can detect the scent of chlorinated swimming-pool water and spilled coffee in the pages of an old journal. Smell is perhaps the most opaque of the five human senses; the one that’s hardest to put into words. No wonder it’s key to the uncanny intrigues of the film, part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, by the French director Léa Mysius.Vicky literally sniffs out trouble with the arrival of her enigmatic aunt, Julia (Swala Emati) — the sister of her father, Jimmy (Moustapaha Mbengue), and the local pariah. Joanne seems particularly affected; she implores Jimmy to send Julia away. A decade prior, around the time Vicky was born, Julia was exiled after an episode of pyromania. Her actions left Joanne’s friend, Nadine (Daphné Patakia), permanently disfigured.As the sexual tension between Joanne and Julia become increasingly apparent, Vicky’s abilities take on a new dimension. Julia’s scent causes Vicky to experience visions of the past, and in woozy flashbacks, we see the origins of her family history alongside her: the unspoken racism and homophobia that swirls around Julia, a skilled gymnast who seems to be blamed for Joanne’s sexual orientation.At the same time Vicky, who is multiracial, is aggressively bullied by her provincial peers. Like her aunt, she’s a modern-day witch, even spending her free time concocting perfumes out of dead crows.The film cleverly relies on color, physicality and elemental symbolism to express these tensions: the repressed Joanne swims daily in freezing waters; the untouchable Julia lights things aflame. The story’s various interpersonal frictions are rarely detailed in the dialogue — a distance that resonates with Vicky’s peculiar coming-of-age. She doesn’t know what the adults are going through, but she intuits how they feel.The Five DevilsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More
