Despite occasional moments of calm, Lorna’s life is small, difficult and unhappy

Lorna's Silence

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It takes an awful long time for much to happen in Lorna’s Silence. The biggest problem with the film isn’t how long it takes to reach its inciting incident, though, but how much better it is before it does. Once the plot kicks into high gear, co-directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne seemingly realize that after spending half of the film skilfully constructing the lives of its characters, there isn’t much time to get to the desired conclusion. Suddenly the pace switches from languid to rushed and what should have been a powerful climax ends up feeling haphazard.

Arta Dobroshi plays Lorna, an Albanian immigrant living in Belgium. Having received her Belgian citizenship through a sham marriage to Claudy (Jérémie Renier) orchestrated by people-trafficker Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), Lorna finds herself in the process of prolonged settlement into her new country. The next step for her is to receive a divorce from her recovering junkie of an immigration-loophole husband, so she can in turn marry a Russian man wishing to gain his own legal citizenship. Her endgame once this is accomplished is to finally bring her actual Albanian boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj) to Belgium so the two of them can open up a snack bar with the money they’ve made in their merry-go-round of marriages.

Unfortunately, Fabio is on a tight timeframe to get the Russian into Belgium and doesn’t agree with Lorna about the best way to achieve a clean divorce that won’t raise police eyebrows, leading to Lorna’s titular silence.

While the plot of Lorna’s Silence is complex, the film’s strong points are not. The Dardenne brothers take a bare-bones approach behind the camera, capturing the film as unobtrusive observers. Shots stay static for long periods of time and characters’ placements on the screen are natural, as if the camera isn’t even there. This approach isn’t particularly visually interesting, but it does a lot to highlight the characters’ small, unhappy, difficult lives.

Dobroshi shines as Lorna. Like most of the movie, her performance isn’t flashy, but it works wonderfully. Though she nails Lorna’s stone-faced resiliency in the face of soul-draining situations, Dobroshi really stands out are in brief moments of levity the script allows. Here Lorna’s Silence is at its saddest — through simple facial expressions and body language, Dobroshi shows that these moments of brightness in Lorna’s life are fleeting and usually come parcelled with even deeper lows than usual soon thereafter.

Lamentably, even Dobroshi’s performance can’t save the film when it switches from a gentle trot to an outright sprint in its final third. If the Dardennes had approached their conclusion with the same meticulous attention to detail they brought to the beginning, they would have earned more than a hesitant recommendation.