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 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.

When we first see the protagonist of 2008 Belgian film The Silence of Lorna, they are flitting around the general area in which they habit; darting from the shops, back through the streets and then home again to an unwelcoming and droll apartment. Their partner is home, smoking and listening to loud rock music. The partner apologises and tells the lead that they'll stop going out and doing what it is they're doing, an exchange that we feel may have just played out for the umpteenth time. The home quarters are colourless and drab, the walls undecorated and furniture sparse – perhaps they've just moved in, perhaps they're really poor or maybe something more sinister is going on. We wonder what the ragged looking partner does that forces them to be as apologetic as they are, the suggestion that they play a friendly game of cards together might itself suggest a gambling problem; the manner in which the partner is shot, that is to say from behind, gets across a sense of anonymity or alienation about them on first sighting, particularly in regards to how the character feels towards them. Very quickly, the Dardenne brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc have caught us up in the world of these people through their realist style and wonderful techniques; a sensation that does not abate until the very end.

The lead is the titular Lorna (Dobroshi), a young woman; an Albanian immigrant living illegally within the Belgian city of Leige and in a false, loveless marriage to the aforementioned partner who's named Claudy (Renier). Lorna's a simple enough girl with relatively attainable aspirations although living amidst a complicated scheme, her tone quiet; her dress sense normalised and in Kosovo born actress Arta Dobroshi, an uncomplicated; unspectacular; unknown acting quantity whom carries a close to all but innocent expression on her face throughout as grins at the situation she's in and bears it. Lorna already has a partner away from Claudy whom is also Albanian, a man named Sokol (Ukaj), and has her eye on a disused structure sitting idly on a plot of land that she one day hopes to turn into a snack bar-come-restaurant with him so as to bring in the cash. Her confidant is a local gangster with broader connections to a Russian criminal organisation; somebody we feel she'd have absolutely nothing to do with ordinarily – a cab driver named Fabio (Rongione) whom is able to access her the necessary items needed to live in Belgium out from under this shroud of seediness and falsity.

The film is a wonderful, involving mediation on the morality that comes with most of the actions, reactions and scenarios of what Lorna is facing within the film. Living with a man as unappealing as she does; using somebody else for her own gain and breaking international rules so as to be in a designated place are crimes she has either committed or is on the way to committing before the film has even begun. Complications that arise later on with the organisation of somebody's death stretch the band a tad too much for poor Lorna, and it's then she realises the trouble her actions have put both her, and those around her, in. The Dardenne's balance this agonising central character study and the torn morals that come with it with the back-burning gangsters whom oppose Lorna's anti cut-throat ideas of divorce because they incur police involvement. The result is a beautifully crafted and solid piece of drama that's gripping from its humble beginnings right through to its terrifying finale.

By day, Lorna works in a laundromat steaming sheets and pressing clothes and so forth. The job entails pressing out and washing out both the grime and creases from numerous sheets which come in, something that echos what she has going on in her private life as her very soul begins to collect the grime and the creases that come with operating within the world she's operating and dealing with the people she's dealing. The grime threatens to reach a breaking point, so much so that a ploy to organise a case of faux-domestic abuse involving Claudy may just be enough to at least save his life as the Russians plan to simply have him overdose; a death which is clearly a step too far from Lorna's perspective and something far too weighty for her conscience to take.

The film is a quietly murky piece, and it's this event which does so well in capturing this overlying canopy. Lorna and Claudy being forced by way of the state of desperation they're in to forge a domestic abuse scenario in which one is the victim and one the aggressor. The agonising planning of this event; the excruciating practising of it that must be completed prior to the execution proper and then the fallout which unfolds as a result of it are individual instances that manifest because of what these desperate characters have got themselves involved in. This being a film about process, about processes and the tortuous carrying out of a number of procedures so as to hopefully spawn a fresher, more hopeful dawn is captured wonderfully by the two sibling directors. There's a coldness to proceedings, a detached sense of everybody within the film not liking one another at all although never daring to actually admit it with the long takes that're applied handled expertly: the emotions of pain; frustration; anger and weakness which begins to manifest within numerous characters gradually rearing themselves on the faces within. The film is a brilliant character study, an unnerving thriller and a quite brilliant piece.

Lorna is well played by the actress. Lorna is a complicated woman who is involved in a game between the Belgian underground and marrying a Russian mobster. The only problem is that she is married to a drug addict who needs to die. She is also in love with a man named Sokol. She dreams of running a snack bar or cafe rather than working at the laundromat. But things slowly go awry when she can't a divorce fast enough. Her current husband wants to quit and go clean. Lorna gets paid for the marriage and the arrangement with the Russian mobster. Along the way, we learn Lorna's ethnic background and her motives. The film's ending needs to be more clear. We will never know the future for Lorna at the end and that's troubling.

To see the movement in this film , you become a part of it's pace. It's smoky cold feel of the spaces explored in this film allows you to immerse yourself into the the whole international thing. Being an American I tend to love the patience taken in these French films. They are woven and character developments take more value than just a get to the point story with a predictable ending. As usual in French movies, symbolism takes precedence over story. Still, reality is quite evident in the grim concepts displayed. Being of first generation immigrants,I can identify with the premise and the desperation involved. The lead character is brilliant in the way she gives less yet give so much in her subtle expressions. The direction is superb and the storyline leaves you wanting more. Many directors with this consistent success may often relax in their past laurels but the careful development of the pace of this murky tale is quite endearing.I would strongly recommend this movie for those who are plain cinema lovers.