Tori and Lokita [2022]

 Stark tales of illegal refugees – who suffer harrowing conditions, exploitation and apathy as the going rate for hopes of a marginally better life – have been a recurring motif in the Dardenne brothers’ canon. In La Promesse and The Unknown Girl the immigrants existed on the edges, even if their experiences and stories were eloquently and powerfully evoked. In Lorna’s Silence, however, they took the centre-stage, thus amplifying the associated desperation, dehumanization and despair. Tori and Lokita had strong parallels with the latter film in that sense, despite the outward differences – focus on an African kid and adolescent, instead of adults from a “lesser” Europe, and replacement of marital relationship with a found family which, in-sync with the Dardennes’ universe, demonstrated a deep and heart-warming bond. The titular characters are eleven-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and sixteen-year-old Lokita (Mbundu Joely) who’ve made the arduous journey from Benin to Belgium only to find themselves ghettoized in a vicious quagmire thanks to jaded immigration authorities that’re reluctant to extend residence permit to Lokita – the two, having developed profound attachment to each other, have positioned themselves as siblings to the cynical authorities – which, in turn, has made them tragically vulnerable to the traffickers chasing them for payments, and a drug racket run by a chef (Alban Ukaj) – in order to pay their mounting debts – who uses them as mules and sexually abuses Lokita. The film’s rare moments of levity – the inseparable duo practicing ways of cracking the immigration interviews or performing a Sicilian song for tourists – were fleeting asides in an otherwise relentlessly bleak, suffocating and downbeat work that, despite being a relatively lesser Dardenne, was undeniable in its painful cry and social urgency.

Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: French

Country: Belgium

Sud (South) [1999]

 Sud might well be one of the most violent films in Chantal Akerman’s oeuvre, even if there’s no display of blood in it; the violence in it, rather, hung in the air – in its defiant gaze, discomfiting silences and understated expressions – like brooding and ominous ether. Akerman, inspired by her love for the writings of Faulkner and Baldwin, had travelled to the American South to film a meditative reflection on the land. However, the gruesome lynching and murder of a black working-class man called James Byrd Jr. at the hands of three white supremacists – who flogged him, chained him to their pickup truck, and dragged him for around five kilometres before dumping his dismembered body in front of a church frequented by the town’s African-American community – which had occurred just before she was supposed to begin filming, radically shifted her attention, as she instead decided to set her documentary completely in Jasper, Texas where this horrific incident had occurred, in order to present a dismayed inquiry into the historicity, manifestation, perpetuation and immediate aftermaths of a hate crime such as this. The interviews with the Jasper’s residents covered a wide-ranging discourse – solemn ruminations on centuries of oppression, violence and hatred that African-Americans have faced; description of the specificities of this very public crime; the disquieting machinations of organized right-wing hate groups; the Sheriff’s casual downplaying of the crime’s racist motivations by attributing it to economic factors instead – and these were alternated with a sobering church service in Byrd’s memory; melancholic observations of the place’s oppressive milieu through silent long-takes; and ending the work with an incredibly unsettling tracking shot of the entire stretch through which Byrd was mercilessly dragged.

Director: Chantal Akerman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: Belgium

The Meetings of Anna [1978]

 Disaffection, displacement, loneliness, rootlessness, and emotional ambivalence were the defining attributes of Chantal Akerman’s autofiction film The Meetings of Anna. Made right after her monumental masterpiece Jeanne Dielman and during a phase when she was crafting one sublime, muted, nuanced, decidedly political and profoundly personal work after another, it formed a compelling companion piece to Je Tu Il Elle in particular and so much of her cinema in general, given her striking explorations of feminism, identity, queerness, memories, existential crises and living in a state of flux. Made with customary formal rigour – narrative minimalism, sparseness, empty spaces, melancholic hues, and bold use of silences – it presaged her magnificent mosaic film Toute Une Nuit, in the way they were both foregrounded on fragmented and momentary relationships.  Anna (Aurore Clément) – striking stand-in for Akerman herself – is a Belgian filmmaker who’s on a movie screening tour through various cities across Europe – Cologne, Brussels, Paris, etc. And, while putting up at different cold, impersonal hotels – small and shabby, big and elegant, discreet and modernist – she engages with diverse people and for a myriad reason, viz. impersonal one-night-stands with strangers, clandestine sleep-over with an old lover (Jean-Pierre Cassel), attempts at reconciliation with a bitter former friend, candid reconnect with her mother (Lea Massari) with whom she can easily shed all her physical and emotional inhibitions. Alongside these, she’s continuously trying to get in touch with a woman with whom she had a brief but intense affair. The cyclicity of her existence was brilliantly underscored when, finally on her own bed in her apartment, she listens to a series of telephonic messages which end with plans being spelled out for her next move screening tour.

Director: Chantal Akerman

Genre: Drama/Semi-Autobiographical Film

Language: French

Country: Belgium

Down There (Là-bas) [2006]

 Chantal Akerman made an intensely personal exploration of her fragile mind – filled with existential dilemmas, psychological ambivalence and political inquiries – in her spare, solemn and minimalist diary film Down There. Its formally rigorous focus on constricted physical spaces, expressions of displacements, and melancholic silences remind one of her fearlessly naked early work Je Tu Il Elle, albeit with the bold foregrounding of her body in that film replaced with her monologues here. Her reflections on the Holocaust, her family and her Jewishness, in turn, presaged her final work No Home Movie where she discussed these topics with her mother who was a Holocaust survivor. It was made during the month that she spent in Tel Aviv as a guest lecturer in a university there, during which she stayed in an apartment lent by a friend. Set almost completely indoors and in a manner that was disarmingly voyeuristic, we see long stretches capturing an ageing couple residing in a house opposite to hers – he’s seen spending his time either tending to his plants or having coffee along with his wife in their balcony – captured through a static camera and shot in grainy visuals through the blinds on her windows. And these sparse, extended and strangely hypnotic long-takes were sparingly accompanied with Akerman’s distinctive voice covering a mix of thoughts, memories and musings on such aspects as suicide – her aunt who was once a very gregarious woman had killed herself as did Amos Oz’s mother –, if it would’ve been better to settle in Israel vis-à-vis Belgium after the WW2, and the troubling present day realities of Israel’s settler colonialism that’s manifested by a bombing that takes place in the neighbourhood.

Director: Chantal Akerman

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Diary Film

Language: French

Country: French

Toute une Nuit [1982]

 Toute Une Nuit – Chantal Akerman’s mellifluous peek into the momentary, the ephemeral, the illusory and the transitory when it comes to romance, passion, amorous flirtations, solitary longings, heartbreaks and estrangements in their multifarious expressions – remains a beguiling interplay between minimalism and maximalism. On one hand – akin to the Belgian filmmaker’s signature formal approach – it’s muted, understated, elusive, shorn of details and expositions, and devoid of stylistic or narrative flourishes; on the other hand – and this is what possibly made this such an unconventional entry in her oeuvre – it relied heavily on precise mise-en-scène, meticulous editing and intricate narrative architecture, considering its massive ensemble cast. The resultant work – filled with a dizzying string of tantalizing vignettes – was a hypnotic symphony of fragmentary emotions covering euphoria, joy, melancholy, regrets, loneliness, ennui and banality. Set over the course of a single torrid summer night in Brussels, we witness an engrossing array of fleeting encounters and loosely strung tableaux – of strangers meeting for short drinks at taverns or aimlessly dancing to lilting music, lovers spending nights at shabby hotels only to part ways later, married couples either rejuvenating their love gone stale or deciding to move on, clandestine lovers experiencing joy or indecision, a man leaving a note under the door only to be met by his rushing sweetheart a few steps later, a disillusioned wife leaving on a whim only to return at dawn, a man sleeping alone in his decrepit apartment waiting in futility, etc. Gorgeously shot in grainy, washed out blues, and bereft of narrative contextualization and continuity, this may perhaps be best described as a succession of shorts stitched together for a whole decidedly larger than its tantalizing parts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chantal Akerman

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Experimental Film

Language: French

Country: Belgium

Je Tu Il Elle [1974]

 Existential ennui, detachment, disaffection and alienation were the dominant themes in Je Tu Il Elle – Chantal Akerman had made a few shorts and a couple of feature-length films prior to this, but this arguably was her breakthrough work – and they were captured with the kind of stark, low-key, understated ambiguity, formal rigour and boldly experimental touch that would define her oeuvre. That she was just 23-year old then – freshly back from New York where she experienced a diverse set of avant garde filmmakers – made this quietly defiant exploration of feminist subjectivity, neurosis and sexuality that much more startling. The film – shot in inky, grainy B/W – is structured into three acts through which the four components of its title are presented. In the first act we see Julie (played with formidable courage by Akerman herself) – the title’s “Je” – confining herself in a small apartment for a few days where she arranges the furniture, attempts to write a rambling letter to someone – potentially the title’s “Tu” – obsessively gorges on sugar, and even sheds her inhibitions by disrobing herself. In the middle act, she moves out of the place and takes a ride with a long-distance trucker (Niels Arestrup) – the title’s “Il” – who opens up about his family and infidelity upon being provided a quick, impassive gratification by her. And, in the film’s final act where the proceedings once again shift to indoors, she has an unplanned night halt at the place of a young woman – the title’s “Elle” – who, as it becomes gradually evident, is a former lover; and, in the daring, extended and strikingly de-sexualized climax, they engage in passionate love-making before Julie must again silently move on to somewhere else.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chantal Akerman

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Road Movie/Experimental Film

Language: French

Country: Belgium

La Promesse [1996]

 The Dardenne brothers had already made 7 feature-length films earlier, but it was with La Promesse that they didn’t just mark a new beginning and receive smashing international breakthrough, it remains one of their most incredible works too. With this, therefore, the Belgian duo marvelously established – with assured command, immediacy and vitality – their radical humanism, political defiance, aesthetic palette and formal rigour that would define their filmography thenceforth. Set in the outskirts of Liège – the city which, with its industrial and working-class ambience, would become the dominant milieu in their works – it stirringly focused on impoverished illegal immigrants who face exploitation, discrimination and apathy in the hopes of finding better lives for themselves; and, in turn, it provided a peek into the underground trades that profit out it. Roger (Olivier Gourmet), a relentless middle-aged man, is in this business – providing shabby accommodations to undocumented migrants, and fleecing them of money and extracting free labour too. His comrade-in-arms is his gangly teenage son Igor (a then 14-year old Jérémie Renier) who works as an apprentice, but gets pulled in by his demanding father for various chores. His impressionable mind and underlying empathy are tested upon a Burkina Faso man’s accidental death; and when Roger tries to brush it under the carpet by tricking his intensely vulnerable, newly arrived wife Asita (Assita Ouedraogo) and infant son out of his radar, the young boy takes a stance even if that can rupture the fragile bond with his self-serving father. Brilliant performances, exquisite evocation of the grungy surroundings, unequivocal yet understated political commentary, and extraordinary balance between minimalism and emotional undercurrents, made this a quietly devastating work filled with moving moral epiphanies.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Urban Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: French

Country: Belgium

Lorna's Silence [2008]

 Coming right after their devastating portraiture of the nadir of desperation in L’Enfant, the Dardenne brothers – the proletarian chroniclers of the voiceless, the marginalized and the working-class, with their distinctive brand of gritty social realism – once again treaded on dark waters in the bleak and tragic Lorna’s Silence. With its thematic focus on lonely illegal immigrants who’re pushed to live outside the edges, and in its evocation of overpowering guilt – for inability to prevent an avoidable death, even if the death is neither mourned nor regretted by anyone except by the protagonist – reminded me of their fabulous and heart-breaking recent film The Unknown Girl. Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is a striking Albanian woman who – coaxed by her boyfriend (Alban Ukaj) with whom she dreams of opening a café, and orchestrated by the shady, ruthless Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) – has entered into a sham marriage with Claudy (Jérémie Renier), a junkie in need of money, in order to get Belgian citizenship. The plan’s to bump the pitiful Claudy off with drug overdose, as that would allow her to keep her citizenship and get hitched to a wealthy Russian in another fake marriage; however, upon seeing his desire to quit, she starts developing a soft corner for him; and her impassive existence is thrown off balance when she ends up sharing an unplanned moment of passion with him borne out of this growing tenderness. Some of the plot contrivances and the allegorical climax felt tad unlike the Dardennes; however, Doroshi’s superlative turn, her defiance to exit the inexorable cycle of exploitation she’s stuck in even if that may cost her everything, and all portrayed through steadfast minimalism, definitely made it a poignant watch.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Urban Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: French/Albanian

Country: Belgium