The nameless Belgian city in Lorna's Silence is a world of the barely surviving. Not quite in the sense of L'Enfant, where the central characters live from day-to-day on whatever dough they can scrounge together. Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is slightly better off than the last protagonist to face the lenses of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes, Bruno (Jérémie Renier). The two characters share in common a plight of the soul, something they seem to have ignored until erring so gravely.
Dulled by the modern world, they have come to see everything in terms of monetary value, Bruno with his black market cache and Lorna with her ever-present purse, carefully filing each note away. And in both films, the Dardennes beg the question, when (if ever) in this anonymous modern world, does humanity come into the picture?
All the Identity Money Can Buy -- Nationality and Lorna's Silence
Lorna -- an Albanian immigrant working by day at a dry-cleaning service -- has taken on extra work for extra crash through Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), a calculating gangster. She has been set up with a sham marriage to a junkie, Claudy (Renier, even more wiry than in L'Enfant) in order to become an Albanian. The idea is for the the addict to OD so Lorna can remarry into another sham marriage with a Russian mobster.
Until Claudy pledges to turn things around and go cold turkey clean for good, all goes according to plan, and Lorna treats him as no more than part of a transaction. She's involved with another man, Sokol (Alban Ukaj), and so the marriage (and marriage in general) is just another bargaining tool -- a means of selling herself in order to procure the capital for a snack bar, or simply, a better life.
The Dardennes never judge Lorna too harshly. As with Bruno in L'Enfant, she and Claudy appear as victims in a dehumanizing system (capitalism) that rewards exploitation of self and others. The film is, to put things lightly, an unflattering look at nationalism. Whether or not Lorna is considered "Belgian" has little bearing over who she is. Her ties to the unnamed city (the film was shot in Liège, Belgium) is purely financial, as are most of the connections to the people in her life.
Her attitude, of course, changes toward Claudy as she can no longer deny, if not love, at least pity and compassion for him. These human instincts, suppressed for what has been at least months, quickly put Lorna at odds with her obligations to Fabio, the man who is by and large her employer, however off-the-books the arrangement might be.
The Dardennes Brothers Dangle the Hope of Redemption
In the crudest (or maybe just metaphoric) terms, Lorna's Silence is a parable about the conflict of a person's business or financial goals versus her personal feelings. And even when the wrong choices are made, the Dardennes still offer a shot at redemption, however hopeless and impossible the prospect may seem.
When approaching this in the film's final stretch, the Dardennes are slightly less convincing, and maybe that's what separated Lorna's Silence from L'Enfant for many. The former took away the award for best screenplay at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, while the latter took the top-prize (Palme d'or) three years prior.
But in its build up and spiral downward, Lorna's Silence is ultimately the stronger picture of the unseen brutality of a purely monetary world. And since its premiere at Cannes in May 2008, with the collapse of the world economy, Lorna's emptiness and moral ruin has only become more resonant. The whole affair would be downright dystopian, if it weren't so unfortunately contemporary.
DVD Special Features
None to speak of, unless you're counting the trailers for other Sony Pictures Classics films. This is about as bare bones a release as they come.
Join the Conversation