Lorna’s Silence
Directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & Cinema Village
Runtime: 105 min.
BELGIAN FILM TEAM Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne do small things profoundly.Their new movie, titled Lorna’s Silence, makes
its strongest, most persuasive moments when Albanian immigrant Lorna
(Arta Dobroshi) silently weighs her options and her moral choices.
Throughout
the Dardennes’ measured, meticulously casual method—a post-doc,
quasi-realism where most action happens in non-intrusive two-shots,
wide shots or off-camera—one may tire of such stylistic nobility and
desire more emphatic visual poetry. I longed to hear gifted Belgian
singer An Pierlé’s emotive hit single, “How Does It Feel?” for its
equivalent but plangent expression of a woman’s deep empathy.
Dobroshi’s
Lorna lacks Pierlé’s consummate melodrama, although her dark-haired
beauty is vividly expressive.The Dardennes won’t allow emotional
excess, so Dobroshi discreetly balances compassion and dissatisfaction.
Lorna’s need for money is a means toward contentment.This is better than the Dardennes’ The Child, an
intelligent but dismal critique of the new European economy where a
young father willingly sold his new infant. By now, the Dardennes’
scrutiny of modern social horrors is starting to feel almost complacent
in its cautious distance.Their technique—brilliant elision of a murder
scene actually accentuates Lorna’s compassion—is more honest and
perceptive than contrived nightmare scenarios—such as Tony Manero and last year’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—that cater
to art-film pessimism.The Dardennes don’t go there; yet they’re nearly
as drab. When Lorna’s pimp tells her “You shouldn’t worry about it, a
junkie prefers drugs to life,” it recalled the misconception in Kathryn
Bigelow’s now overrated The Hurt Locker that “war is a drug.”The pimp’s alibi is another art-movie fallacy.
Surely
the Dardennes know better, yet they make it easier to accept cynicism
than to trust sentiment or full-out emotion.Their astute social
analyses could also help us understand desperate straits in
white-collar life and add variety to their celebrated filmography.
Otherwise, a film as moving as Lorna’s Silence starts to resemble underclass condescension.
anonymous
