Le Silence de Lorna - tense and compelling
By Joyce Glasser - 28/11/2008
The Dardenne Brothers are Belgium’s answer to the Coen Brothers, and define the best of European film for art house cinema audiences just as the Coen Brothers have come to symbolise the best of American cinema for their many fans. All four brothers are in their fifties and (with a couple of exceptions) write, direct and produce their own films.
The Coen Brothers have won four Academy Awards and the Dardenne Brothers have won four major awards at the Cannes Film Festival, including the first and second Palmes D’Or (Rosetta) ever given to a Belgium film, (Rosetta and L’Enfant). Both sets of brothers use recurrent themes, characters and even actors in their films. But when the last Coen Brothers’ film came to town a month ago all the critics queued up. With the arrival of the Dardenne Brother’s latest film, Le Silence de Lorna there were lots of empty seats.
It’s true that watching Le Silence de Lorna is like paying the cinema to place the heavy burden of the world on your shoulders for 105 minutes, with none of the humour, A-list talent, scenery or locations of the Coen Brothers to cheer you up. The Dardenne Brothers’ previous features were set in their home town of Seraing a depressing, no man’s land of dying industry in the Walloon part of Belgium.
For ‘Lorna’ they moved close by to the big city – Liège – where illegal immigrants and eastern European migrants can more easily blend in with the crowds. Le Silence de Lorna (I think the translation, ‘Lorna’s Silence’ is much more effective) is based on a true story the Brothers heard, about a young Albanian woman who obtained her Belgium citizenship through a marriage of convenience with a junkie, brokered by a gangster.
The plan is for the gangster to die of an ‘accidental’ overdose, induced by the broker Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), making Lorna a widow. Lorna will them marry a rich Russian and with her share of the money will fulfil her dream of buying a snack bar with her trafficker boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj). Claudy, however, wants to go clean and somehow, Lorna, while treating him with contempt, can’t resist helping him. It’s the mesmerizing relationship between Lorna and Claudy, and something profound in this apparently immoral woman that derails part of the plan.
The Dardenne Brothers turn it into a kind of Faustian tale of an apparently amoral woman, manipulated by various men, who signs a pact with the devil (Fabio) that she later tries to reverse. One by one the men that have shaped her life in Europe either die or are discarded. As they disappear her strength and resolve grow. She’ll resort to anything to escape the plan, and her guilt, even inventing her pregnancy with Claudy’s child. But that pregnancy is also something for her to cling to when there is literally nothing else. Like Rosetta, Lorna is a desperate woman who has no options left, but somehow finds what it takes to survive on some of her own terms.
What makes the film so tense and compelling is the Dardenne brother’s unique directing style and unpredictable characters that turn this sordid tale into something strange and wonderful. This story of lowlifes at the margins of society would be awful in less accomplished hands. The Brothers don’t tell us anything and the film has surprisingly little dialogue. They let the gestures and actions of their characters tell the story. If we take the journey, the weight of the world is lifted from our shoulders long enough to give us a glimpse of the stars.