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Written by Sarah Boslaugh Friday, 04 September 2009 04:46

The film is a thriller for grown-ups in which the interest lies primarily in the way the characters react to situations and how they deal with the consequences of their choices.

Reportedly George Bernard Shaw once asked a woman if she would sleep with him for a million pounds. She said perhaps she would. Would she sleep with him for ten shillings? Certainly not! she responded with outrage. What do you think I am, a prostitute? We've already established that, Shaw intoned; now we're just establishing the price.

Like many jokes, whether you find that funny depends largely on your point of view. As a white middle-class male citizen of one of the most powerful countries in the world, Shaw could easily find amusement in other people's attraction to money. But people who do not enjoy those advantages might find the exchange a demonstration of the worst kind of snobbery which applies absolute moral judgments to situations from which the speaker is protected, thanks to his privileged station in life.

The same principles apply to the moral dilemmas faced by characters in the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. In Lorna's Silence, the Dardennes take us inside the world of illegal immigrants struggling to establish an ordinary life for themselves in Western Europe—just the sort of life taken for granted by most people who will see the film. Not surprisingly, these outsiders are confronted with choices which would horrify more fortunate individuals, and the genius of Lorna's Silence is that it makes the characters and their choices understandable without turning them into either victims or villains.

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is a young woman from Albania who achieved Belgian citizenship through a sham marriage with drug addict named Claudy (Jérémie Renier). Now it's time to cash in by divorcing Claudy and marrying a Russian crime boss so he, too, can become a Belgian citizen. The fake marriages are engineered by the gangster Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), for whom making such arrangements is all in a day's work. It's similar with Lorna: She's doing it to get enough money to buy the café she wants to run with her boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj).

So far, so good, until Lorna complicates things by becoming sympathetic to Claudy and his attempts to stop using drugs. She doesn't mind the fake marriages and even induces sham husband #1 to beat her up in order to establish grounds for divorce so she can marry sham husband #2 a bit quicker. But she balks at becoming an accessory to Fabio's intention to kill Claudy to expedite the second marriage (a divorce followed rapidly by a second green-card marriage might draw the attention of Belgian immigration officials).

I don't want to give away any more of the story because it might spoil the impact of experiencing the film firsthand. Lorna's Silence draws on elements of the political thriller, but as a thriller for grown-ups in which the interest lies primarily in the way the characters react to the situations they find themselves in, and how they deal with the consequences of their choices.

In a just world, the Dardenne brothers would be as well known as the Coens; outside the United States they probably are already. They made documentaries in Belgium for years before switching to feature films, and have twice won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, in 1999 for Rosetta and in 2005 for L'enfant (The Child). The influence of their filmmaking style can be seen in many contemporary art films from The Wrestler to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

The look and feel of Lorna's Silence is a bit of a departure for the Dardennes. Part of the difference is due to this film being shot with a less mobile camera and on 35 mm rather than Super 8, but there's also more obvious attention to the conventions of feature films. Without appearing fussy, shot choice and composition mirror the trapped nature of the characters; until the very end of the film, they appear mainly in cramped interiors or as isolated individuals on city streets.

Careful color choices help achieve a sense of heightened reality, with many shots featuring a red highlight against a beige or white background. It's not obtrusive, but the cumulative effect is to create a world which seems realer than real and when other colors are allowed to dominate the frame the effect is startling. The absence of a conventional soundtrack, consistent with the Dardenne's previous features, heightens this sense of reality because non-diegetic sound is not allowed to intrude on the situations presented in the film.

It's a measure of how highly regarded the Dardenne's films are that I even need to mention that Lorna's Silence didn't win the Palme d'Or, although it was awarded the prize for best screenplay. I won't go so far as to call it a crowd pleaser, but as a more traditional feature film it's certainly easier to watch than Rosetta or L'Enfant. So if you've never seen one of their films, Lorna's Silence is a good place to start, and if you are familiar with their previous work you can rest assured that this one will not disappoint. | Sarah Boslaugh