The devastating
Tori and Lokita
recovers all the fierceness of the most radical and harsh cinema of the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.
Three years after
Young Ahmed
won the award for best direction at this festival, despite the fact that it was far from being as round a film as
Rosetta
and
El nino,
both crowned with the Palme d'Or
in 1999 and 2005 respectively, the filmmakers once again demonstrate their ability to turn a movie theater seat into an uncomfortable place with no escape from the miseries of the world we live in.
A cinema without concessions, with the harsh reality in front, although it irritates those who believe that art is not this.
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The Dardenne brothers reflect in 'The Child' on the sale of minors
The Dardenne's cinema always speaks of the most vulnerable and children occupy the first place in their denunciation of a Europe whose integrity has been questioned for too long by what happens in the small boats that cross the Mediterranean Sea.
Tori and Lokita
is the story of a boy and a teenager who live in a reception center in Belgium, where she hopes to fix the papers that are not granted to her.
Both have sworn eternal brotherhood after being reborn inside the boat that brought them from Africa to Italy.
From that brotherhood born in southern Europe they keep a song in Italian that will be the sentimental note of a rough and crude film, in the usual line of some filmmakers who since the end of the nineties paved the way for a new and subversive social cinema .
Tori and Lokita
is a film about the love between two children, about imaginary family ties that are pure survival, and about how mafias profit and take advantage of a legal loophole through which all kinds of horrible stories slip through.
Tori and Lokita
is just one of those stories.
A grain of sand that hurts like a stone on the forehead.
88 dry minutes that give no respite, without embellishments or valley areas.
The film starts with a close-up of the newcomer Mbundu Joely while the bureaucracy subjects her to the interrogation that will determine whether or not she can access her legal documentation.
The magnetism of Mbundu Joely, the truth of his abused innocence, is one of the great successes of a film that, as usual in the Dardennes, sticks the camera to its two main characters without implying delve into the horrors they suffer.
On the contrary, the respect towards the two children, that way of not taking away their dignity before the camera under any circumstances, is the most radical and exciting aspect of a way of filming in which a close-up of the extremely sad Mbundu Joely is enough to say everything. necessary.
At his side, the boy Pablo Schils, that fictitious brother who represents his only lifeline, contributes the mischievousness of the survivor.
Smart and mature, he protects his sister as she protects him.
In a memorable sequence in which she cannot fall asleep after being humiliated by one of the exploiters, she sings a song to him while the boy falls asleep.
They are Siamese twins in a jungle where unscrupulous criminals and faceless bureaucrats reign.
If Cristian Mungiu summons in
RMN
to the new monster of Transylvania, xenophobia, the Dardennes remind us who they are, in the face of this beast, the most vulnerable and unprotected.
After the blow from the Dardennes,
Nostalgia,
by the Italian Mario Martone, was presented, a film in the antipodes in its form.
Based on the homonymous novel by Ermanno Rea,
Nostalgia
talks about the pitfalls of idealizing the past to the point of turning it into one of those postcards worn out by the sweetened filter of memory.
The film follows in the footsteps of a man played by the actor Pierfrancesco Favino who returns to his native Naples after 40 years living abroad to meet again with the one who was his best friend, now turned into a capo of the Camorra .
It could have been an old western (something even enunciated by one of the best characters in the film, a neighborhood priest busy saving the teenagers of his parish from the street), but in his two long hours, he needs to hit the shot.
There are too many things left over and the main thing, that insurmountable duel between two old friends, is rudely squandered.
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