Even Better Than the Real Thing: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s “Lorna’s Silence”

Arta Dobroshi is Lorna, an Albanian woman living with Jeremie Renier’s Claudy, a poorly recovering heroin addict in Liege.  When the two are first introduced in the space of the tiny apartment they share, it’s hard to make out their relationship (withholding is crucial to the Dardennes’ narrative stratagems): roommates, brother and sister, estranged lovers?  She assembles a makeshift bed for the pathetic Claudy in the living room, and seems only to relate to him as though a professional caregiver, even as it’s clear that for him she’s something of a lifeline.  Bits of information begin to dribble out: Lorna’s got a boyfriend, an Albanian, and hopes to open a falafel joint with him, but first the troubled Claudy must overdose and die so that she can she can marry a wealthy Russian looking to buy his way into Belgian citizenship.  Following that, Lorna will get divorced a second time and marry her lover. Unfortunately Claudy views Lorna as his only hope for getting clean, and creepy Fabio, the broker of Lorna’s marital arrangements, isn’t excited about waiting for him to come around.

Things get further complicated when Claudy commits to rehab, and Lorna’s coldness towards him is warmed by pity. In a crucial turn, this leads to the two making love one night.  It’s sex of the kind we don’t see all that often in movies: borne of inexplicable and complicated passions rather than pat narrative expediencies, as frenetic as it is unexpected (still manufactured, of course).  Lorna’s arranged (or so she thinks) to spare Claudy’s life via a divorce and in the afterglow the two share a few brief shots of sunlit idyll—shopping and bike riding before the other shoe drops.

The rest of “Lorna” exists under the looming shadow of those few brief moments of happiness, which recall Renier and Deborah Francois cavorting in an outdoor rest area in “L’Enfant.”  Lorna’s eventual decision to break with the criminals and strike out on her own is the critical Dardennesian moment.  In all their fiction films cinematic devices (editing, camera placement, scripting) are employed to build a sense of tension and then release; just because the brothers’ aesthetic reminds of verite doesn’t mean that they’re leapfrogging over their medium to a higher plane of expression.  As Bresson recognized, the way to approach the cinematic ineffable was to replace conventional language with another manner of speaking, not remove the tools of narrative cinema entirely.  The Dardennes don’t offer some privileged access to reality any more than the Italian neorealists or the group of Americans dubbed the neo-neorealists (and as much as some critics claim to desire a realist cinema, I wonder how many would turn out to watch me grocery shop, or finish typing out this review); they’ve merely (merely!) managed to so fully control the medium that they’ve tricked us all into thinking their films are outside movies.  “Lorna’s Silence” is no exception.

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

[Jeff Reichert is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot.  He is currently directing his first film,  Gerrymandering