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Rigoureux, dépouillé, tranchant – 10/10/2009

Comme toujours avec les frères Dardenne, nous voici dans le quotidien d’une jeune femme à la marge, une albanaise insaisissable, qui tente de trouver l’essence de sa vie entre les mariages blancs qu’elle est conduite à faire pour exister. Dans cette fable sociale, assez froide comme toujours, on suit les pérégrinations de Lorna, étoile lumineuse et silencieuse du film, perdue entre ses vrais et ses faux amours. Reste que si L’Enfant était magistral, Lorna peine à être aussi intense, certainement car le silence laisse moins prise à l’émotion.

The Dardenne brothers are figures who float at the edge of the Anglo-Saxon consciousness. Occasionally fashionable, a film of theirs will be feted, before they’re forgotten again. The Silence of Lorna hasn’t generated much critical acclaim, but in some small way it seems as though their films are an event, as filmmakers they’re worth checking out no matter what they’re doing.

The film is Lorna’s story. Played with a restraint which is the all the more impressive for those brief moments, crucial to the narrative, when it’s broken, by Arta Dobroshi. Lorna features in just about every scene in the film. She’s an immigrant, who has settled in Belgium, and married Claudy, a hopeless junkie, in order to get her visa. This is part of a deal whereby she will marry a rich Russian following the end of her marriage to Claudy, after which she will finally get to settle down with her sweetheart, Sokol. Together they plan to open a cafe, and you kind of know that Lorna possesses the drive and the nerve to make it work, to become a 21st century success story of the globalised world.

It’s a simple tale, and classic storytelling. The neo-realist filming style, as plain and unadorned as can be, contributes to the narrative’s believability. In another context the story might be melodramatic, but in this one, and told this way, it feels like a report from the front line of the global village, where the simple act of choosing to keep a child can become one of almost absurd courage. Lorna’s insistence of preserving her humanity in spite of the price she will have to pay for it is heroic, and leads to a denouement containing a whole forest full of tension.

The directors succeed in coaxing a remarkable performance from Dobroshi, as well as from Jeremie Renier as Claudy. The film’s simplicity is its strength. The Silence of Lorna is a film made in the image of its heroine: discovering a sense of value in what lies beneath the surface, in spite of the world’s constant seeking of value in what can be seen on the surface alone.

“Lorna’s Silence,” the newest award-winning film from the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, defies review while demanding discussion. Like John Sayles’s “Limbo " and the Coen Brother’s "No Country for Old Men,” the film’s unresolved ending has polarized audiences and critics alike, leaving us guessing at both the protagonist’s fate and the filmmaker’s intent. Though there are a myriad of elements we could analyze and debate (including the Dardenne brother’s increasingly nuanced examinations of those marginalized in the European economic integration following the collapse of the Soviet system), I would like to limit this discussion to, what are to me, the film’s two most audacious features: its narrative form, and its incongruous ending.

The first two acts of “Lorna’s Silence,” up until the junkie’s murder, are the cinematic equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle, and on the surface, there’s certainly nothing new about that. The confoundingly elliptical narrative structure that slowly doles out disparate elements of an obviously doomed criminal scheme has very solid roots in the classic film noir of half a century prior. Consider the following plot synopsis: Lorna and Sokol, two Albanian immigrants with big dreams but little means, team up with Fabio, a paranoid Belgian mobster, in an elaborate double marriage scheme. Lorna first gains Belgian citizenship by marrying Claudy, a Belgian drug addict, and after securing her citizenship card, Fabio sells her hand in marriage for a hefty sum to a Russian mafioso attempting to gain citizenship in the country. Now all that stands in the way of their mutual enrichment is Claudy, and the Russian won’t wait for a divorce. But can Lorna live with herself if she allows Fabio to go through with his nefarious plans?

What’s interesting here to me is that, of course, “Lorna’s Silence” isn’t a noir. The hand-held, gritty cinematography, consisting primarily of naturally-lit closeups, stands in complete antithesis to the slick, moody black-and-white photography of the classic noir. Although I found the story compelling, it hardly exudes the aura of doom and tension we would expect from a noir. And of course the omission of a soundtrack (a Dardanne signature) simply removes the film that much further from the genre. So the real question is, why did the Dardanne brothers spend the first two acts of the film developing an elliptical form more akin to films made 60 years ago? In the noir, the developmental omissions are in the service of suspense, but in ‘Lorna,’ I think we have a case of a cinematic metaphor: the narrative mirrors the confused state of our protagonist; just as we slowly learn more about the larger scheme at work, Lorna slowly comes to grips with her own conscience. It’s a daring marriage of form and content, and though it’s certainly not the first to attempt such a feat, I think it’s one of the more successful.

Even more audacious, though, is of course the ending (or lack thereof, depending on who you ask). Lorna’s attempts to save Fabio’s life fail; Fabio gives Claudy an overdose even though Lorna has already secured a divorce. Recognizing her own culpability, and lacking any real path to redemption, she imagines that she is impregnated with Claudy’s baby, and is determined to save it at all costs. She grows increasingly unstable, and when Fabio has one of his goons drive her out to the woods under the pretext of taking her out of the country, she manages to escape, only to find herself utterly alone and lost in the woods, constantly talking to her imagined baby with reassurances of his safety. The film fades to black with her falling asleep in an abandoned shack, her mortal fate left unknown.

The entire third act is jarring, having passed with little preparation from the stubbornly hard-scrabble to the spiritually surreal. My initial reaction to the ending was a letdown; the film, having satisfied all of my predictions, had led me to expect Lorna’s brutal yet matter-of-fact murder. But instead, we find her transferred from the city, a veritable maze of human interaction and cruelty, to nature, far from any signs of humanity. She stumbles through the trees, lost, happening on an abandoned shack just before nightfall, and falls asleep, alone with her insanity. Any filmmaker attempting such a feat runs the danger of being accused of laziness or immaturity, and I have to admit that both crossed my mind. Yet upon reflection, I’ve come to see this end as deeply satisfying, if melancholy. Lorna had gambled another human’s life away and sacrificed her sanity in the process; whether or not Fabio’s goon kills her matters not. She’s already lost, forced to invent a new reality to smother her guilt. What more could we have gained from her death that’s not already evidenced in her separation from reality?