Few directors offer the patient viewer such consummate rewards as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, longtime documakers whose uncompromising, beautifully observed studies of Belgium’s urban poor reveal a peerless talent for conjuring drama out of the mundane and wresting emotion from determinedly unsentimental material. Lorna’s Silence is their first feature not set in their hometown, Seraing, but rather in the more densely populated city of Liege – a logical backdrop for a tale of hard-scrabble immigrants trying to secure their livelihoods through less-than-honest means. Albanian Lorna is introduced rifling through euros in her wallet – an action that will be repeated throughout, pointing to the drama’s material underpinnings at every turn. Pic teases out the complexities of her situation in gradual but absorbing fashion: About to secure Belgian citizenship through her marriage of convenience to hapless junkie Claudy, Lorna is in cahoots with local lowlife Fabio, who has arranged for her to remarry a Russian mobster in exchange for a hefty sum. But when a divorce from Claudy proves hard to come by, Fabio plots to have him die by overdose. Venal but not without scruples, Lorna tries to spare Claudy and hasten divorce proceedings by feigning domestic abuse all the while holding down a job, carrying on a relationship with lover Sokol and putting up with clingy Claudy’s please for help and attention as he desperately tries to stay clean.
