Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Lorna’s Silence received less-than-glowing notices upon its Cannes
premiere because – horror of horrors! – it exhibited faint traces of an actual
genre plot, a development perhaps not wholly in line with the Belgian auteurs’
realist canon but which nonetheless suits them smashingly. Relocating from
their usual hometown stomping ground of rural Seraing to urban Liege, the
Dardennes focus their latest on Lorna (Ellen Page lookalike Arta Dobroshi, in a
transfixing performance), an Albanian woman stuck in a loveless marriage to
junkie Claudy (a piercing Jérémie Renier). Like water seeping through the
cracks of a brick wall, slivers of context gradually trickle out from Lorna’s
day-to-day grind at home, at work, and in conversations with Sokol (Alban Ukaj),
a boyfriend with whom she plans to entrepreneurially set up a snack shop. It
turns out that Lorna married Claudy to become a citizen, and that her mobster
benefactor Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) plans to kill Claudy via OD so that Lorna
can then marry a Russian seeking citizenship. Complications arise when Claudy
makes a good-faith effort to get clean, thereby engendering unexpected sympathy
from Lorna, which manifests itself in a bout of lovemaking that, once Fabio
goes ahead with his plans, turns out to have unintended psychological
consequences for Lorna. Lorna’s immigration scam affords the filmmakers with another
vehicle for socio-economic inquiry – especially in Lorna’s complicity in her
own economic exploitation – with euro notes, a recurring sight (and sure to prompt
more Bresson comparisons), soon taking on an almost totemic quality. Nonetheless,
such issues resonate less powerfully than the Dardennes’ humanistic fixation on
flawed characters from society’s margins stumbling, unexpectedly, toward enlightenment
and salvation. Throughout, the Dardennes’ trademark handheld cinematography and sparse
musical scoring proves as assured and intimate as ever. It’s a signature style
that, particularly in the film’s latter sequences, creates a sense of disquieting
suspense, amplifying the story’s more thriller-esque machinations while also
allowing for a penetrating, deceptively sly interior portrait of Lorna, a
wayward soul whose stoic exterior masks tumultuous inner change, and who
ultimately finds meaning, and liberation, in a slow slide into madness.
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