Lorna's Silence - 07 March 2010

Principal cast: Arta Dobroshi, Jeremie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban Ukaj

Film notes: The Dardenne brothers (Rosetta; L’Enfant) set a contemporary moral tale in one of Belgium’s defunct industrial cities, French-speaking Liège. They enter the social borderland where the old working-class zones have collapsed and an assorted underclass of migrants, drug-addicts, and petty criminals has moved in. Lorna, an Albanian migrant, lives in the middle of these rival, cash-strapped forces. While she has an ordinary job in dry-cleaning, and the harmless ambition to own a snack bar, Lorna owes her life in Belgium to underworld operators. They decide that she is a useful pawn in one of their big-stake games. For a Russian mafioso to enter the country as Lorna’s husband, the drug-addict whom Lorna married to obtain residency must be disposed of. Lorna is well-placed to ensure he overdoses ASAP. Bound by her debt to the mob and driven by her now not-so-harmless ambition to hasten the realization of her snack-bar dream, Lorna is not just a victim of circumstances: she is a hard-nosed player in the game of getting ahead, and is more than tempted to make a pact with the devil. The moral plot thickens when the junkie, Claudy, unexpectedly stakes a claim on his own humanity: he asks Lorna to help him get clean. Obliged for the first time to view Claudy as a human being, the steely Lorna confronts the challenge posed by compassion.

The realism of the Dardenne portrayal of locale and character is remarkable: no musical score fills the silences, every scuff and mutter resonates; “second-skin” camera work gives close, unblinking depictions of human frailty and distress. This high-grain realism witnesses to some harsh facts of 21st-century existence, but also serves to stage a contemporary morality play.