Lorna's Silence Movie Hollywood 2009Genres: Art/Foreign and Drama
Release Date: 31 July 2009
Starring: Arta Dobroshi, Fabrizio Rongione, Morgan Marinne, Olivier Gourmet, Anton Yakovlev
Directed by: Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Produced by: Olivier Bronckart, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Review
This latest from Belgium’s Dardenne brothers – Europe’s quiet soldiers of urgent, humane cinema – needs defending after receiving an inexplicably poor critical reaction from some quarters. Perhaps it’s the extreme nature of the story that alienates or the unknowable central character that obscures the deeply pertinent moral inquiry at its heart. But the truth is that the deeper you dig, the more you’ll find that ‘The Silence of Lorna’ is just as rewarding as the directors’ last film, ‘The Child’, which also told of a youngster driven to warped behaviour by poverty or the threat of it.
The film is a portrait of Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), a young Albanian immigrant in the Belgian town of Liège, whose dream to live independently in Western Europe and run a sandwich shop with her boyfriend has distorted her sense of morality. In rabid pursuit of her goals, Lorna has entered into an arranged marriage with a Belgian junky, Claudy (Jérémie Renier), and even agreed with her mob handlers that they will kill him, by faking a drugs overdose, when he’s no longer useful. For much of the film, Lorna is willing to go along with this sinister arrangement, until a sequence of events light, or reignite, the flame of empathy and humanity inside her.
The Dardennes’ portrait of Lorna is brilliantly nuanced; it’s there to be explored and queried and debated as the film offers subtle, changing lines of communication between us and Lorna. For most of the film we witness the cold language of currency exchange between Lorna and everyone she meets – a language we recognise as a poor substitute for decent human behaviour but which also reveals how lonely and desperate she is. It’s only later, when she seeks intimacy with a strange nurse and a doctor, that she fully reveals this. It’s then that we come to see Lorna’s hard exterior as no less a performance than the cuts and bruises she tries to fake to seek a divorce on false grounds of physical abuse.
Meanwhile, we witness various challenges to her tough-girl act, whether it’s Claudy’s desperation or, later, the possibility that Lorna’s life may be fundamentally changing in a way she never expected. It’s this last development that allows us finally to stop looking at – or looking down on – Lorna and empathise with her. Once she opens the doors to self-examination, we see her more clearly ourselves.
Dobroshi gives a terrific performance, as does Renier, making his third appearance in a film by the Dardennes, who once again show themselves to be masters of turning grim social realities into deep explorations of human behaviour. By the time ‘The Silence of Lorna’ reaches its quiet, unusual, reflective finale, the film feels almost spiritual in its investigation of a lost soul.
The young woman is-Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), an Albanian immigrant who has travelled to Belgium with a group of Russians led by Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), in a plot to arrange her permanent residency. The Russians pay Claudy (Jeremie Renier), a Belgian citizen, to marry her, but he is a man marked out to die: the Russians plan to kill Claudy soon after the marriage. They consider him an easy, dispensable target because he is a drug addict and dropout, a pathetic shadow of a human being who will not be missed and whose "overdose" will be credible to any detective. Killing him is faster than filing for divorce and will give Lorna her Belgian passport. But this all comes at a price: Lorna must subsequently act as the Belgian citizen marrying an incoming Russian in search of the same inclusion into Europe that she has now gained. Lorna is aware of the plan to kill Claudy, but does not express her feelings about it--she keeps her silence--and instead concentrates on what she had dreamt about when leaving Albania: being with her boyfriend Sokal (Alban Ukaj)--an Albanian truck driver connected to the Russians and likely the one who introduced her to them in the first place--and setting up a little cafe in central Liege. For a short time, this works.
As true of the Dardennes' previous features, Lorna's Silence displays an acute but unselfconscious social realism, an approach setting their films apart from those of other contemporary directors working in the same mode--whether the U.K. kitchen-sink dramas that have evolved more recently into Mike Leigh's romantic portrayals of working-class Northerners or Ken Loach's recent saccharine domestic fictions. In Lorna we also find the familiar group of Dardenne actors in similar or opposite roles: Olivier Gourmet was the police inspector in L'Enfant (2005) as he is here; Rongione had been a thug in that film, though he had also played the great friend and well-meaning waffle-maker in Rosetta (1999); Renier has disturbingly been stripped both of Bruno's arrogance in L'Enfant and Igor's youthful conviction in La Promesse (1996); and Morgan Marinne from Le Fils (2002) is intriguingly cast as Fabio's near-silent sidekick. If one imagines the possible trajectories of the Dardennes' characters at the end of each film, this development for Marinne, as well as Renier, is disconcerting--and very believable.
It is most interesting to see the same Dardenne motivation underlying this latest film--a strong moral predicament and ethical focus--developed in a new way. The possibility of redemption has animated all of their features, posed always in secular terms--religion is irrelevant in a world where humans struggle for employment, within conflict-laden families, against poverty or total marginalization--and tied to the moment when the protagonist no longer sees the other as the focus of resistance, hatred, or, in Lorna's case, murder. Redemption comes when one sees the other as a human being, one who can be touched, who might be able to help or can be helped. "It is when we feel guilty that we become more human," the brothers have explained. "In all our films, it is thanks to feelings of guilt that the character breaks his or her routine and changes ... there is nothing morbid in this; guilt is not narcissistic but enables us to work towards something better.
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