Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 03, 2009 6:44 am 
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JEREMIE RENIER, ARTA DOBROSHI IN LORNA'S SILENCE

Beautiful clarity about ugly situations

The Belgian Dardenne brothers make feature films that combine fine craftsmanship with concern for the downtrodden. The high regard for their powerful work and power in Europe and particularly at Cannes are less evident in the United States, where some writers speak of their “doing what they do,” as if their work were repetitive. It isn’t at all. The intense focus, the relentless directness and immediacy are always there, and the main characters are often desperate and needy. This leads to violations of moral codes that somebody deeply regrets. These are constants. So are the locales, which stick to the brothers’ own industrially desolate part of Wallonia – though this time they’ve moved their camera from the area of Seraing to the capital city of Liege. Each story the Dardennes have told has been quite different.

Celebrated though they are, the Dardennes’ features are simple, and few: La Promesse, Rosetta, Le fils, L’Enfant, and the present one Lorna’s Silence are theyr whole feature output since 1996.

Lorna’s Silence moves into the area of international trading in lives – hence the move to Liege. Lorna is a young Albanian woman who agrees to several fake marriages so she and a fellow Albanian can raise the cash to start a snack bar. The deal is brokered by Fabio, a cab driver with Mafioso connections. As the film begins Lorna has already hooked up with Claudy (a wasted, shrunken Jérémie Renier), a Belgian heroin addict paid to marry her so she can get Belgian papers. Fabio and his allies plan to get rid of Claudy through a drug overdose so Laura can then marry a Russian mobster so he can get Belgian citizenship.

Being married to Claudy inevitably makes Laura begin to sympathize with him in spite of herself, especially when he starts struggling to get clean. The heart of the film is a typically Dardennes sequence of simple, intense, closely related scenes that show Lorna’s coldnsess toward Claudy grudgingly turn to sympathy. When that happens, can she retain her “silence” about the plot to destroy Claudy? Once again, the stakes are brutal, and there are human pawns in an economic game. The conflict drives Lorna to a desperate state in which her hold on reality weakens. The finale is quietly tragic.

Jérémie Renier has grown up with the Dardennes and become in international film star. He was the lead, as the son of Dardennes regular Olivier Gourmet, in La Promesse when he was only fourteen, his first important film role. Now 28, he’s had a multitude of good performances, his arrival as a mainstream French actor signified by his appearance in Olivier Assayas’ beautiful Summer Hours. La Promesse also was, like Lorna’s Silence, about the exploitation of foreigners in Belgium: he rebelas against his father. In L’Enfant he was a young hoodlum so callous he sells his own baby. Here, as a drug addict, he’s a Belgian whose addiction puts him at the bottom of the social scale, a plaything of gangsters to be manipulated for profit, like a stolen organ, but in this case to be used briefly and then tossed away.

There seems not much really to be said about a Dardennes films, and it’s not good to reveal the important details. But we can endlessly debate the issues the films raises. In Lorna’s Silence, typically, a terrible moral choice has already been made and Lorna has to lie with the nasty consequences. The film doesn’t consider what the alternatives were but it’s a fair assumption that they weren’t good. It’s hard to see Lorna even has a choice now. The urgency of the Dardennes’ film action emphasizes the lack of choice or, alternatively, the desperation in which choices must be made. Anta Dobroshi, who plays Lorna, has a simplicity ad transparency that make her seem quite real. She tries to fake being beaten by Clady so she can divorce him on those grounds rather than let Fabio end the marriage by killing him . But clearly her situation leaves her no wiggle room.

We don’t see what happens, which again emphasizes the powerlessness of the principals (and in a way Fabio too is a pawn in a game).

Its their skill at presenting people in extremis yet keeping it matter of fact and vérité, while still delivering an emotional wallop that makes the Dardennes extraordinary in the world of cinema today. The situations they depict are ugly, but the clarity of the depiction is beautiful.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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