The two Belgian directors follow the journey of two Beninese emigrants looking for papers.
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A little over twenty years ago, in the late 1990s, the Dardenne brothers, with the promise (1996) and especially Rosetta (1999), invented a new on -board form of realism, so abundantly declined that It has since imposed itself as its majority definition. Two golden palms later (Rosetta and the child), their cinema has not evolved much: the characters in distress follow one another and the same formulas produce the same effects of meaning, namely to experience “a feeling of revolt against the injustice that reigns in our societies “, as they write in their note of intent.
Today, it is the turn of a little boy and a teenager, immigrants from Benin, to accomplish the course of Dardennian events in Tori and Lokita, presented in competition at the Cannes Festival, where The duo now has its habits (and have many awards). The film scrutinizes the indefinable link which unites these two shipwrecked on the Liège pavement, claiming to be brother and sister with social services, but united by something deeper, like the song they push in the evening in karaoke or experience exile. Hoping for the regularization of the elder, they allow themselves to be exploited for clopinettes, here by a crooked restaurateur, who sends them to deliver drugs, there by their smugglers who strip them on occasion – symptoms of a contemporary neoesclavagism, Heart of Western societies.
But the papers are refused and Lokita, to obtain false, is sequestrated as “planter” in a clandestine firm of cannabis. The mechanics of the worst start and never until then the dardenne had not given the impression of applying such a mechanical program, to align the expected sequences, to sacrifice to Manichaeism, to lead to the end on a message , certainly generous-not to regularize, it is endangerment-but delivered all cooked.