Legalization of rage – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
“Tori and Lokita”, the winners of the anniversary prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is released in Russian cinemas. In the new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, young African migrants confront drug dealers, European bureaucracy and general distrust, but in retelling the film sounds ten times more interesting (drug traffic! sex slavery!) And ten times more boring (bureaucracy! hard life of migrants! ) than it really is.
Sixteen-year-old Cameroonian Lokita prepares for an interview at the immigration service: she memorizes questions and answers, tries to sound convincing. It depends on the results of the interview whether she will receive Belgian documents or be sent out of the country when she turns 18. Her main task is to prove that she and Tori (he is ten years old and already has documents) are really brother and sister.
It is immediately clear that Lokita and Tori are not at all similar to each other, it is immediately clear that they cannot live without each other. Literally: without each other, they will not survive. The interview scares Lokita. Almost everything frightens her, and without Tori, she has two reactions to this world: submissiveness or a panic attack. Tori and Lokita work for a drug dealer, a chef at an Italian restaurant, so the kids get pizza and focaccia. If Lokita gets the documents, she will become a nurse and can send money to the family so that her brothers go to school. But she fails the interview, and the cook offers her to work on a marijuana farm: then he will make her fake documents. Here, on the farm, or rather, in a giant barn somewhere outside the city, they will take away her SIM card, tell her how to water marijuana and which button to press in case of fire, and lock her up. There is no way out.
The Dardenne brothers, the patriarchs and – this can already be said – the classics, act in their ideal manner: they follow the heroes without stopping for a second, they lock the viewer in someone else’s shoes and do not let him be distracted, they bring the viewer almost to a panic attack in narrow, shabby corridors of Lokita’s prison – and mercifully switch to Tori, who is looking for any way to see his sister, a boy on a bicycle, a boy who knows how to lie, a boy who knows how to think and hide.
The brothers built the script based on the physics of the actors: the fast, agile Tory (Pablo Shiels) is constantly on the move and the monumental Lokita (Joyeli Mbundu), who stoically endures everything that falls to her lot. The Dardennes in all their films, over and over again, show the inhabitants not only of the bottom, but of the bottom depths, people in a borderline state. And over and over again they say that you can remain human only if there are people next to you. If the system – bureaucratic, criminal, corporate, any – turns out to be more important to you than people, this will lead to tragedy.
Their style of shooting – a handheld camera that does not let the characters out of sight, and sometimes almost crashes into them – once again turns out to be ideal for a thriller. All of their films are a kind of moral thrillers. And in “Rosette” (1999, unexpected “Golden Palm” of the Cannes Film Festival), where the heroine also fights for life as best she can, and in the drama “Child” (2005, the second “Golden Palm” of the Dardenne), and in a quiet corporate tragedy ” Two Days, One Night” (2016), and in the not-so-successful “Young Ahmed” (2019), where a twelve-year-old boy fanatic turned out to be more radical than the radicals, the tension builds not because of plot twists, which may not be, but because for the fact that the world is unstable, and the only way to survive is to act. Find something or someone to rely on. As Luc Dardenne wrote in his diary in the mid-90s, reflecting on Rosette: “The heroine (trade unionist?) confronts the despondency and fear that surrounds her. So it will be possible to continue making political films today. Not tapes of disappointment, but a chronicle of the struggles of men and women who resist specific manifestations of injustice that bring grief.
Speaking of the Dardenne brothers, all critics unanimously pronounce the word “humanism”, worn out from helplessness. Humanism, humanity, faith in a person is a cliché, but Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne really believe in a person, in this particular Lokita with her slow movements, in this Tory, from which a brilliant manager or a brilliant thief can grow. The villains in Tori and Lokit are not exactly caricatured, but unimportant: they are only part of the world that brings grief.
The brothers worked on a film about migrants for about ten years: they studied the material in migration centers, talked with migrants, psychologists. They prefer to call their heroes not so much migrants as exiles. They are not interested in the system in which the characters are forced to fit in (if they cannot become part of one system, they will be gladly accepted by another, drug dealers and modern slave owners), directors are interested in the person and his immediate inseparable ties.
But in the finale – too frontal, too harsh – the brothers turn away from the person and directly accuse the European bureaucracy of complete indifference to human lives. The Dardennes never allowed themselves either sentimentality or moralizing, did they really not resist?
No, why not. They’re just angry. It’s just that the world has broken down, and in order to fix it, you need to show where this breakdown takes place. If you refuse to look at it, if you, blinded by the system, ideologies, abstract ideas, have stopped seeing a person, if working for drug dealers is all you can offer people – not migrants, not outcasts, not slaves, not couriers – people , then, perhaps, you need to talk to you somehow differently. Directly.
Mercy for the fallen? No. Respect for the doomed. Rage. Rage.
In theaters from November 17
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
