Lorna's
Silence
by
Howard Schumann
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.
Iin
the Belgian city of Liege, Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), 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.
The plan is to eventually divorce Claudy and 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 camerawork 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.”
©2009 Howard Schumann
CineScene
