Le silence de Lorna

The Dardenne Brothers have a habit of immersing us in the muck of life, then casually reminding us that, in case we forgot, we are surrounded by beauty. Their latest film, Lorna's Silence, is full of the trials of conflicted humanity with all too visible surface scars hiding its true nature. Set in the Belgian city of Liege, Lorna, an Albanian immigrant, is eager to realize her dream of owning a snack shop together with her boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), a long-distance truck driver. In order to pursue this goal, she has paid the sleazy mob-connected Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) to arrange a marriage with a Belgian heroin addict, Claudy (Jérémie Renier), in exchange for Belgian citizenship.

After divorcing Claudy, Lorna's plan is to marry again, this time to a Russian mobster (Anton Yakovlev) so he can get his own papers. Luc Dardenne says that the idea for the film came from a social worker who told them about an incident in which her brother, a junkie, was offered a huge sum of money by the Albanian mafia to enter into a paper marriage with an Albanian prostitute. She would then divorce him for another wad of cash and be free to marry a member of the Albanian mafia, both becoming Belgian citizens in the process.

The early images are all about money. From the opening scene where bills are being counted, money is constantly being handed over, counted, refused, or buried in the ground. The cold expression on Lorna's face and her abruptness in conversation tells us almost immediately that the marriage is a fake. Lorna ignores Claudy's almost pathetic neediness while greed pervades the atmosphere. She fakes being physically abused by Claudy in order to secure evidence for a quickie divorce but Claudy is unwilling or unable to hurt her. In a scene marked by ghoulish humor, she slams herself into a door and bangs her head against a wall to fill her body with bruises.

Things become complicated, however, when Claudy vows to kick his drug habit and Lorna begins to care for him, resisting Fabio's attempts to eliminate him via a drug overdose. Dobroshi delivers an outstanding performance, as does Renier who has become one of the Dardennes' most confident regulars. Though the film is more plot-driven and the camera-work less oppressively intimate than some of the brothers' earlier films, Lorna's Silence is nonetheless a gripping, powerful drama, full of searing insight into the human condition. What is most important is not the story or the movement of the camera but the continuity of the theme of the awakening of conscience.

Just when we feel that the characters have no place to go but down, the Dardennes tear us away suddenly from our addiction to the physical and hurl us into a world of tenderness and infinite possibility. As Lorna senses that she is suddenly at risk, she seems to break through the cycle of futile actions that have marked her life and, even in the mundane task of gathering wood to build a fire, we sense the exhilaration of someone growing before our eyes. As the Dardennes invite us to step into a bigger world, we hear the closing reverie of Beethoven's other-worldly Piano Sonata No. 32 reminding us that we are tuned into what the Quaker poet Thomas Kelly has called "the silence which is the source of all sound".

The titular heroine of the Dardenne brothers latest movie is Lorna, a recent immigrant to Belgium who spends her days earning paychecks from a dry-cleaners while earning more substantial money by selling herself off as a bride to a Russian man looking to immigrate to Belgium himself. Before she can marry the Russian however, Lorna must obtain a divorce from her current husband, Claudy, a broken-down, pathetic, drug-addict who only married Lorna in order to obtain the cash to fund his habit.

The relationship between the young couple is complicated. Lorna, with a boyfriend back home and another potential husband eager to obtain Belgian citizenship waiting in the wings, has no romantic attachment to Claudy. Early scenes show her disgust and impatience for her lazy, feeble husband who does little more then shoot-up, play cards and follow her around like a puppy-dog. Nevertheless she can't help but feel sympathy towards the man she is using solely to obtain her citizenship. Claudy's feelings are equally muddled. He is aware that Lorna is using him and yet is devastated when she talks about divorce. He plays on his weaknesses to illicit Lorna's sympathy and then plagues her with childish demands. Their relationship, masterfully played out by Arta Dobroshi and returning Dardenne brother favourite Jérémie Renier, is utterly, intensely fascinating. They're both the victims and the aggressors in their relationship and who you root for and who you find repulsive flips frequently from scene to scene.

But the movie isn't focused on the relationship between Claudy and Lorna. As Lorna struggles to earn her money quickly she is forced to choose between protecting Claudy, whose desire to kick his drug-habit is problematic for her divorce proceedings, and her desire to protect her own small dream of owning a café with her long-distance boyfriend. Her optimism and strength are quickly torn apart when the man responsible for arranging both her marriages quickly yanks her down to reality by reminding her that she is little more then a pawn for people who want to cheat the system. The movie falls apart in the final third, the twists and turns a bit ridiculous given the slow, yet gripping, pace of the previous sections. And yet the movie is still compelling, quietly questioning a system in which people must go to such violent lengths in order to obtain simple and innocent desires.

The lack of music, gritty cinematography and superb acting all lend itself to the feelings of realism that pervade the film. The Dardenne brothers make us believe in Lorna's plight, her struggle between what she feels morally is right and the silence that will enable her to live out her dream.

The Belgian film "Le silence de Lorna" was shown with the title "Lorna's Silence" (2008) in the U.S. The movie is co-written and co-directed by the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

The protagonist, Lorna, who is from Albania, has made a pact with the devil. It involves her marriage of convenience to a Belgian citizen, so that she can become a Belgian citizen. Once she becomes a citizen, the plan is to remove her husband. Then, in another marriage of convenience, Lorna, as a widow, can marry a Russian who in turn will become a Belgian citizen. Lorna wants to become a citizen so that she can obtain a loan to open a snack shop in Belgium. She wants the cash for startup money.

The plot is crafted by a Belgian cabdriver, who has no compunction about doing whatever it takes to move up in the gangster world. If Lorna's husband, a drug addict, has to be eliminated, that's not a problem.

So, everyone has dreams--of cash, of a snack shop, of citizenship, of underworld advancement.

The problem is that the drug addict, Claudy, is obviously in love with Lorna, and he's desperately trying to stay clean. Lorna has sympathy for this needy, suffering young man, and she'd like to adjust the pact with the devil to somehow spare him. However, what she learns is that the devil doesn't like people who want to change the pact.

Arta Dobroshi, as Lorna is, indeed, from the Balkans. (So, it's not a stretch for French speakers to accept her authentic accent.) Ms. Dobroshi is a superb actor, and gives a brilliant performance as a woman who is basically decent, but finds herself in a less-than-decent situation.

Jérémie Renier is excellent as her husband, Claudy. My wife and I admired his work before in another Dardenne brothers film--"La Promesse." It's really easy for Claudy to slip back into addiction, and it's really hard to stay clean, but he can do it if Lorna helps him.

The Dardenne brothers specialize in films where bad things happen, often to good people. The curator who introduced the film said that the Dardenes specialize in films that offer no hope, but I don't fully agree. They specialize in hard films where tragedy is never far away, but the films do hold out hope for redemption. This is not always enough, but it's better than nothing.

We saw the film on the large screen at the excellent Dryden Theatre in George Eastman House in Rochester. However, it should work well on DVD.

With Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's fifth feature film, Lorna's Silence, they decided to take a surprisingly unique approach to their style in that they made it look more like a film than anything they had done before. Gone are the intimate, gritty hand-held tracking shots that place the audience into the perspective of the characters and shoot from odd, seemingly improvised angles. Instead, each shot here is much more staged and deliberate, focused on Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) and making sure the audience is able to appreciate all of her surroundings in each moment. It was an interesting approach from the Dardennes and I have to admit a little jarring at first, but this step into a more conventional shooting style provided the film with a contrast from their previous work that I certainly appreciated.

As much as I adore their other work, it was nice to see them trying something new and ultimately it worked. The more conventional style does a service for the more conventional narrative structure of the film as well, as for the first time they work with a central plot that encompasses the entire picture, rather than focusing on a more free-formed character study. Lorna is an Albanian emigrant living in Belgium, in an arranged marriage to Claudy (Jeremie Renier) in order to acquire Belgian citizenship so that she can enter another arranged marriage with the Russian Andrei (Anton Yakovlev) after her and Claudy divorce. It's an elaborate scheme all run through Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), a taxi driver looking to make some extra cash.

The setup is unexpectedly complex for the Dardennes, but what's not unexpected is how they approach the story primarily as a way to explore this character. They're not worried about whether the audience is keeping up with all of the semantics of the arranged marriages and divorces because they aren't too worried about it either; instead they're focused on how all of this is impacting Lorna, and that puts them right into their wheelhouse. In exploring this character, they take their trademark understated approach, letting the emotions sink in rather than explode outwardly. This provides for some fantastic internal acting by newcomer Arta Dobroshi, who shines even more tremendously in the few moments where she is able to let those emotions come out. The role marks a genuine "star is born" performance from Dobroshi, someone who we will hopefully be seeing much more of in the near future.

The supporting cast all puts in great work, but I have to give particular mention to Renier, who shines once again in an unusual way. The Dardennes have used Renier in four of their six feature films and it's easy to see why. Without changing his physical appearance remotely he is somehow able to be a complete chameleon in each of his roles. The way he holds himself, the way he moves, the way he approaches any given situation, each and every role he is a completely new person and it's extraordinary to watch because you don't see this guy acting at all. He is the true definition of an actor, one who strips away any semblance of himself and disappears entirely into each and every new performance he gives. You look at his work in L'Infant, this and the Dardennes next feature The Kid With A Bike and it's unbelievable the transformations he goes through.

One of the many interesting things here was the physicality of the film, how the muted emotions were able to manifest themselves in the physical moments such as Lorna slamming her head into a wall to prove that Claudy beats her or the raw and brazenly intimate sex scene. It's in these moments that the Dardennes' more authentic, quieter approach demonstrates it's true ability, making things that would seem ordinary in most films come as a shock and leave a lasting impact on the viewer.

I won't give anything away, but around the halfway point the film takes a turn that I wasn't expecting at all and completely through me for a loop. While the Dardennes had been traveling a more conventional path than usual, in the final act they take Lorna's journey to a decidedly unique place. Their originality shines bright in this final act, with scene after scene that had my jaw open simply over how innovative they had taken the story. I can't give anything away and ruin it for others, but Lorna's Silence began in a more traditional route than I had come to expect from the Dardenne brothers and ended up going somewhere even less conventional than we had seen from them before. Yet another tremendous achievement from two of the best writer/directors working today.

An exceptional performance by Arta Dobroshi who plays Lorna. It is a story that is difficult to forget although it is not Dardenne's best work but it comes very close. Lorna's character develops during her husband's attempt to stop using heroin snd she starts to become invested in his recovery. She becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the fate her Albanian boyfriend and the gang boss have decided he should have in order for Lorna to divorce him and remarry for money. But, Lorna's humanity intervenes and gets in the way of the plans made a while back and it threatens her own life. Will she pull through?