Review: Lorna’s Silence (2009) ****

Though Lorna’s Silence wasn’t as rapturously received by Cannes critics as Rosetta or L’Enfant, the latest from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne manages to be a bit more audience friendly than those other films and it’s a great place to start if you’ve never seen a Dardenne film or if you’ve found their other work difficult to warm up to. As you’d expect from Belgium’s fraternal filmmaking team, there’s the same gut-level suspense wrung from ordinary human drama along the fringes of society, but the story’s stark social realism is touched up a bit with traces of film noir. It’s arty, but it’s also a lot more entertaining than you’d expect.

Kosovoan actress Arta Dobroshi plays Lorna, a young Albanian living in Belgium with dreams of opening her own cafe. In order to gain citizenship, she marries the junkie Claudy (Dardenne favorite Jérémie Renier, looking emaciated and authentically junkie-like) with the promise of $5000 for him when they divorce. She then plans to reverse the deal by selling her new citizenship through marriage to a rich Russian. It’s a seemingly perfect plan that will nicely set her up in her adopted country, but she begins to have doubts when the shady men she’s working for decide it would be easier to murder Claudy than to go through the time and expense of a divorce.

As Lorna’s plan threatens to unravel, the Dardennes ratchet up the suspense and it’s amplified by the very circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Lingering as they do on the bottom rungs of the social ladder, going downward is not an option and there are few people willing to lend a helping hand. In this way, the stakes are heightened exponentially along with the level of desperation.

With its long takes, hand held camera, naturalistic acting and lack of artificial musical score, Lorna’s Silence will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a Dardennes film, but the surprising thing is how entertaining it is. With elements of the criminal underworld and a couple seemingly doomed by fate, the plot at times has the familiar and comforting feeling of a film noir.

Also, the characters are ultimately more naturally sympathetic than the infuriating leads in L’Enfant. Arta Dobroshi especially is terrific in the difficult role of Lorna. She’s one of those inscrutable characters defined more by their actions than their words. Though many of her actions are questionable at best and her motives and intentions are sometimes vague, Lorna’s plight is the result of a series of small bad decisions made in the face of desperation rather than evil intent.

Jérémie Renier (L’Enfant and most recently Summer Hours) is also a key to the film’s success. Claudy is a hard character to like at first, but there’s a wounded vulnerability to Renier’s performance and you believe it when Claudy decides he wants to get clean. In fact, you actively root for him and it’s all the more credible when the seemingly mercenary Lorna begins to display protective instincts toward him.

Stripped of the gloss of a typical stateside drama, Lorna’s Silence nevertheless sucks you into its world and holds you there for the length of its runtime. It gets you to care about its characters, to rejoice in their small moments of happiness and to mourn for their losses. While there’s a sociopolitical message at the film’s heart, it remains subtle and the simple, engaging human drama is allowed to come forward.

Lorna’s Silence (Le Silence de Lorna). France/Italy/Belgium 2008 (US release 2009). Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne. Cinematography by Alain Marcoen. Edited by Marie-Helene Dozo. Starring Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione and Olivier Gourmet. 1 hour 45 minutes. MPAA rated R for for brief sexuality/nudity, and language. 4 stars (out of 5)

Filed under: Reviews
Tags: Alain Marcoen, Arta Dobroshi, Fabrizio Rongione, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Jeremie Renier, Le Silence de Lorna, Lorna's Silence, Luc Dardenne, Marie-Helene Dozo, Olivier Gourmet