LORNA'S SILENCE
This has been a year chock full of immigration stories in films: mostly harsh and unromantic takes like Welcome (an Iraqi teenager tries to swim across the English Channel) or Sin Nombre (a young girl makes the dangerous journey from Guatemala to the U.S. mostly by riding on the tops of trains). Even Costa-Gavras' chaplinesque entry, Both films deal with individual younger people with a dream, one a kind of chaplinesque tale, Eden is West, is much more bitter than sweet.
In Lorna's Silence, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes apply their unique brand of social realist filmmaking to a hot topic, letting the steam out along the way. There are no grand pronouncements or allegorical lessons. They're settings are always the bleak, post-industrial landscapes of urban Belgium where their camera delves deeply into the motivations and behaviors of people acting out of a self-preserving desperation. Like Dickens, in their own modern way, the films are ultimately about the humanity within inhumanity: they put us in the shoes of the petty criminal who sells his own baby in L'Enfant, or the girl who will do anything to get ahead in Rosetta, or the teenager who cares for the widow and child of a worker more or less killed as a result of his father's exploitation.
Here the figure at the center is Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), an Albanian immigrant who has married a drug addict named Claudy (Jeremie Renier) in order to become a Belgian citizen. Lorna has dreams of opening a cafe with her boyfriend, also an Albanian immigrant who crosses borders to work as a laborer throughout Europe. At first, Lorna seems to be focused and self-posessed but little by little the layers are peeled away: she is beholden to Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), an immigration pimp who plans on marrying her off to a rich Russian, as soon as the Claudy can be gotten out of the way.
Many of us cheer the Dardennes and their films because the reveal the lyrical beauty of people and places that so many of the educated movie going public won't go near. They work in confined spaces, generally, with a roving camera, that puts you right in the middle of their characters questionable choices. There is always a moral dilemma at the center. In this instance, it's whether Lorna will stay silent or intervene to save the life of her chronically addicted husband.
And the other reason we love the Dardennes is that neither the choices available nor the solution to the film are ever simply, easy or predictable. In this film the directors broke from the usual style just a bit, shooting less hand-held, with more wider shots, yet the intimacy is still there. It works because Lorna, is for the most part, distant, withholding, it is her coping mechanism, her way of moving in a world that is utterly foreign and uninviting.
The Dardennes' characters are counter-capitalist in a certain way. They are all dreamers, in the worst circumstances who are nonetheless optimistic about their chances of making it through some sort form of exploitation, usually a combination of theirs and others. They say they aren't political and I think that's true. I would call them humanists. Lorna's Silence isn't an obvious call for immigration reform or better drug treatment but, as always, a call to pay closer attention to the people from whom we would much rather avert our eyes.
Lorna's Silence opens July 31, 2009
Written, produced and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; director of photography, Alain Marcoen; edited by Maire-Hélène Dozo. Released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 105 minutes.
With: Arta Dobroshi (Lorna); Jérémie Renier (Claudy); Fabrizio Rongione (Fabio); Alban Ukaj (Sokol) and Moran Marinne (Spirou).
