There's a scene near the end of "Tori and Lokita," Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's strongest work in nearly a decade, that illustrates the difference — the chasm, really — between empathy and identification. Twelve-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and 17-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu), African-born immigrants who have made their way to a bustling Belgian city, are running for their lives, as they have been nearly all movie long. Injured and exhausted, Lokita makes her way to a remote stretch of road and flags down a passing car. The driver slows down, fixes her with a concerned stare and then, sizing up without understanding the situation, promptly drives away.
Our empathy with Tori and Lokita by this point is total, but I think the Dardenne brothers, without wagging their fingers too emphatically about it, want us to see that driver vanishing into the distance and admit that at least some of our identification lies with her. The moment passes in a flash, but the implication lingers as vividly as anything in this swift, urgent and palpably furious movie. We lose something when, whether out of self-preservation or ignorance or indifference, we turn away from the suffering of others. And the Dardennes, occupying their usual zone between clear-eyed moral parable and rough-hewn realist thriller, rebuke this apathy the best way they know how, by telling a story we can scarcely turn away from.
One of the unifying qualities of their much-acclaimed work — and from "La Promesse" (1997) and "The Son" (2002) to "L'Enfant" (2005) and "Two Days, One Night" (2014), you can't really go wrong with any of them — is their ability to pinpoint essential truths about a character's life within a narrow time frame and a uniquely fraught set of circumstances. Tori and Lokita may be imaginary, but there's an uncanny truthfulness to nearly every moment we spend in their company, a sense that their lives are unfolding within, but also beyond, the camera's purview. The Dardennes sketch in a few details in passing — Lokita emigrated from Benin, Tori from Cameroon — but trust our imagination and curiosity to fill in the rest. We believe in Tori and Lokita, in part, because there is much about them we'll never know.
