Cinemania’08 Review: Lorna’s Silence

Sibling Belgian directors Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne never connected with international audiences until their first attempts at long narratives in the late 1990s. With films such as La promesse (1996) and L’enfant (2005), the now middle-aged Dardennes’ have shown to be adept at creating films about the Belgian underclass: immigrants, drug dealers and petty criminals. Lorna’s Silence (Le silence de Lorna) continues along this theme, revealing a hidden world in contemporary Europe that is disheartening in the gains it makes from human lives. While this gritty piece of filmmaking may draw comparisons to 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days due to its equally biting subject matter and handheld camera, it never feels as consummate as last year’s Golden Palm winner.

Claudy the junkie begs Lorna for help

Arta Dobroshi plays Lorna, an Albanian woman who has just received her green card. Lorna is quiet, unsmiling and seemingly unhappy with the man she shares an apartment with - Claudy. The Dardennes cleverly begin the film without explanation: Lorna receives strange phone calls, and the reason for her estrangement with Claudy is unclear. As an audience member, the first half of the film was most successful in that it forced me to uncover the story through the actions and dialogues of the characters. It is by this process of discovery that we soon learn Lorna has been married to Claudy, a junkie, to get a green card. She is then charged with helping him into an overdose so that she can be married to a Russian who is paying the architects of the scheme for Belgian citizenship. While Lorna’s uncaring attitude seems the perfect companion to such a plot, trouble brews when her conscience gets the better of her.

Lorna's husband-to-be, the Russian

Lorna’s Silence is a slow-moving film, feeling even more so in the beginning due to being dropped into the story mid-plot. Despite this, it offers a slice of a black market for Belgian citizenship that is intriguing; and, while never beautiful, the cinematography is appropriate to the subject matter. The problem lies in the second half of the film, which stretches longer than necessary when it could easily have ended succinctly at earlier moments. It offers a psychological portrait of Lorna that should have been foreshadowed earlier in the narrative (even if this means the ending was satisfyingly unpredictable). Despite my misgivings in its direction, the sense of discovery in the beginning coupled with strong performances throughout make this a worthy watch.