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The unhinged handheld camerawork often matches the frantic events onscreen.
Watching a Dardennes film, your heart races, then it breaks.
These are not simply informational queries.
The bureaucrat asking them clearly wants to catch Lokita in a lie.
They ask her to identify the lake near which she grew up and the name of a teacher.
Calm and collected at first, Lokita struggles to keep herself together.
Finally, she starts to cry, unable to go on.
Maybe thats when we realize that she is, in fact, lying.
Tori and Lokita are not actually brother and sister.
Theyre not even from the same country.
(One is from Benin, the other from Cameroon.)
Like many a Dardennes protagonist, they are endlessly resourceful and almost always in motion.
The money they make goes to Lokitas family back home and to the smugglers that brought them here.
The Dardennes dont like to fill in a lot of details when it comes to their characters.
They often rely on the performers to help shade in these peoples psychologies.
Here, the deployment of narrative information seems even more cursory than usual.
But the two young actors convey, sometimes through movement alone, complex inner lives.
He thinks he can get out of any scrape, cross any boundary, solve any problem.
These two kids are surrounded by cruelty, indifference, and suspicion.
The cops and bureaucrats dont trust them.
Theyre practically invisible to the hipsters, bouncers, pensioners, and middle-class couples they sell weed to.
The smugglers they owe ostensibly a church group are basically shakedown artists.
Their supposed employer almost never looks at them, even when he takes sexual advantage of Lokita.
Perhaps these are some of the reasons why Tori and Lokita are so bound to one another.
Their world seems otherwise empty of humanity and warmth.
The Dardennes camerawork seems more restrained than usual this time.
Such softness is rare for these filmmakers, whose characters tend to have cooler, transactional relationships.
But its fair to expect more than just rage from artists especially our greatest and most empathetic ones.
