Art/Movie and Theater

Cannes - Movie Review

The Dardennes film ‘Le silence de Lorna’
Source: www.european-films.net

The double Palme d’Or winners Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne came to Cannes with their sixth fiction feature film in their native Belgium. The film is called Le silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence) and stars regular Dardenne leading man Jérémie Renier, Italo-Belgian actor Fabrizio Rongione and young Kosovar-Albanian actress Arta Dobroshi, who first came to attention in Kujtim Çashku’s Albanian feature Syri magjik (Magic Eye) from 2005.

Rongione and Renier both starred in films by another Belgian talent, Joachim Lafosse, last year; Rongione in Ça rend heureux (What Makes You Happy), which he co-wrote, and Jérémie alongside his older brother Yannick Renier and French diva Isabelle Huppert in Lafosse's Nue propriété (Private Property). Rongione also had bit parts in two earlier Dardenne films and recently wrapped Ariel Zeitoun's Le dernier gang (The Last Gang).


Renier, besides shooting two French features, also appeared in supporting roles in two English-language films: as a Francophone soldier in Joe Wright’s Atonement and in Martin McDonagh’s upcoming black comedy In Bruges alongside Colin Farrel, Ralph Fiennes and Brendan Gleeson. The actor also recently completed L’heure d’été (Summer Time), the new film from Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Boarding Gate) in which he plays the younger brother of Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling.

Le silence de Lorna is the third feature for the Dardennes, after La promesse (The Promise) and L’enfant, which won the Dardennes their second Palme d’Or in 2005. The film was shot in the Liege area, like the brothers' previous features.

The €4 million project is a Franco-Belgian co-production and tells the story of a young Albanian woman who enters a marriage of convenience with a young drug addict in Belgium. She does not want to help her newfound husband get over his addiction, however, because his death of an overdose might actually give her everything she always wanted. Unlucky for her, her husband decides to mend his ways.




Lorna's Silence (Le Silence de Lorna)
by James Rocchi
Source: www.cinematical.com

Some films are, for lack of a better word, glacial; they're immense, dense, frozen and seemingly immobile. And a film like that can affect the viewer in one of two ways; either you bounce off the frozen surface of it, shut out and shunned -- or you find the frozen surface to be a mirror, showing you things within your own reaction to it. With its naturalistic tone and bleak outlook, the new film from the Dardenne Brothers, Lorna's Silence, is certain to provoke those kinds of polarized reactions. I found myself more in tune with the film and what it was reaching for, and was impressed by the familiar Dardenne methods and concerns and themes (which won their film L'Enfant the Palme d'Or in 2005) in Lorna's Silence. At the same time, I can also understand the somewhat lukewarm reception for Lorna's Silence; it's only at Cannes that you hear people saying "Oh, not another hyper-realistic drama set in the gulfs and gaps between old and new Europe. ..."

We follow Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) through her day -- phone calls, work, dealing with life. And that life gradually makes its shape known to us. She's an Albanian, living in Belgium; she's entered a marriage of convenience with Claudy (Jeremie Renier) that's not actually convenient at all, as Claudy's a junkie who's trying to quit; his needs and demands hang heavy on her. But then Lorna has a meeting with Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), and things take a very different turn, as he explains that they have to be sure that Claudy's death looks like an accident. ...

Once Lorna's a Belgian by virtue of her marriage, we come to learn, the expectation is that Claudy will be removed from the picture and Lorna will marry a Russian gangster so he can have the same Belgian citizenship rights Lorna gained by marrying Claudy. Lorna, working towards the modest dream of opening a snack bar with her boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), is playing along -- to a point. She thinks she can make a divorce happen without anyone getting hurt (or, rather, with only herself getting hurt; Lorna's plan to speed up the divorce proceedings is a harsh one), earning her money and marrying the Russian without Claudy having to die. Claudy knows that Lorna's married him for an end -- he's been paid once, and expects to be paid again after the divorce -- but he doesn't know about the Russian, or how the plan involves his demise expediting matters.

The unexpected criminal element in Lorna's Silence gives the film a slick sheen of plot points to ride on, giving the film a spine of expectation that the Dardennes don't normally rely on: Will Lorna save Claudy? Will she be able to save herself? But Lorna's Silence isn't a thriller; and the Dardennes explicitly reject and avoid every scene you'd have in a more conventional version of this story; Lorna's Slience isn't about whether or not Claudy will die, but about how and why Lorna will live.

And Dobroshi's performance is up to the challenge; it's unforced but fully committed, and she manages to make you feel for a woman who's willingly signed up for a horrible series of tasks. It may be hard to reconcile who Lorna is at the beginning of the film with who Lorna is at the end ... until you think about what it is she's been through, and briefly, sympathetically contemplate what that might do to her. Dobroshi's work is naturalistic, but it's also dramatic, especially in Lorna's more frenzied moments.

And yes, Lorna's Silence could be dismissed as more of the same from the Dardennes -- the themes, the ideas, the close-set proximity of hopeless powerlessness and the power of hope. Then again, when you consider how rarely these topics are handled well (if they're handled at all) in film, you can hardly accuse the Dardennes of narrowness of vision or artistic myopia. (Or, put another way; I'll be ready to ignore well-made films about the poor and downtrodden when there are no more poor and downtrodden in the world outside the theater; after the high-class gloss and emptiness of something like Vicky Christy Barcelona, Lorna's Silence hits you like a well-needed slap in the face bringing you back to reality.) Lorna's Silence is not going to win the Dardennes the Palme d'Or in 2008, but that hardly seems the point; it's a strong film from strong film makers, and while most of the talk around the film at Cannes is about the split opinions people have, it's worth noting that they're still talking about it.




La Silence de Lorna
By Jeffrey Wells
Source: www.hollywood-elsewhere.com

Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes are respected architects of stark, minimalist filmmaking. That and a penchant for dark, tightly wound dramas about young fringe types -- druggies, knockabouts, immigrants, etc. -- struggling in the Belgian city/province of Liege constitute their basic game. The bullshit-free moral fibre in their films qualifies them as first-rate guys. They're certainly admired by the critical elite the world over for this.

And yet I was close to enraged by the actions of Arta Dobroshi's main character in La Silence de Lorna, which I saw this morning. Which means I felt strongly irked by the Dardenne brothers' screenplay. Which means, despite the feeling and focus that went into it, that I didn't care for the film. At all.

Lorna (Dobroshi) is an Albanian immigrant who's married a sickly, fair-haired junkie named Claudy (Jeremie Renier) in order to get her Belgian citizenship. She's done so as part of a scheme orchestrated by a rich Russian who will pay her, once she's a citizen, to marry another guy, a Russian, who wants his own citizen card. Her operator is a sharp, feral-eyed cab driver named Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione). But after the marriage scams are completed Lorna's real plan is to hook up with her lover Sokol (Alban Ukaj) and use the money she'll have earned to start a snack-bar business.

The problem is that she develops a soft spot for Claudy, despite the words "pathetic loser" all but stamped on his forehead. The guy is wretched refuse personified, but his whining weakness arouses her maternal urges. He's trying to kick heroin as the film begins, and during Act One she finds his mewing infuriating -- I certainly did. When she learns, however, that Fabio feels it would be better to intentionally overdose Claudy rather than pursue a plan in which Lorna will obtain a divorce from her husband.

She manages to obtain the divorce notwithstanding, clearing the way to marrying the Russian guy. But she feels so protective of Claudio (and so torn up about being in collusion with guys who might kill him) that one night, in order to keep him from going back on the street to score more smack, she impulsively makes love to him. Fabio, not trusting Claudy to keep quiet about the scheme, has him killed soon after, just to be safe. Which of course makes Lorna feel all the more pained, even though she has done everything necessary to dissuade Fabio from offing him.
Then she comes to believe that she's pregnant with Cloudy's child, even though she's soon after told by a doctor that she's not. Then she decides to pull out of the snack-bar plan with Sokol and return to Albania. And then...

In other words, Lorna is initially willing to turn a blind eye to the connivings of scumbags in order to get a leg up, but her sense of moral failure is so acute after Cloudy's death that she effectively becomes Cloudy and pretty much lets it all go to hell.

Obviously her guilt over a junkie's demise makes Lorna a tragic figure -- your heart goes out to her. Compassion for society's lowest and weakest is the highest rung of humanism, but dammit, there's more to tough, morally conflicted situations than just feeling badly about them. Life is hard and then you die. As the woman who lived upstairs from Stanley and Stella Kowalski said in A Streetcar Named Desire, "Sometimes you just have to keep going."

Lorna delivers some payback to one of the bad guys in the final stretch. This provides a certain satisfaction, or at least a hopeful feeling that she's capable of more than passive fantasizing. But the story, which I found more and more listless as it went along, left me with nothing to grow on or feel solid about.

We all feel awful about the bad things we've done. I'll never get over my having beaten a turtle with a heavy stick and causing its shell to bleed when I was seven or eight. (I thought it might be a cousin of a snapping turtle and that it might bite my fingers off.) But you have to somehow get past this. Make amends for your sins, devote yourself to kindness, start a turtle farm. But get on the horse and do what you need to do.