Lorna's Silence is a movie about why doing bad things for the good reasons doesn’t pay off.

 

This French film stars Arta Dobroshi as Lorna. Lorna and her boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj) need some money to open up a small café. It seems like they thought and thought and came up with the craziest idea possible to come up with the money they need. First, Lorna marries Claudy Moreau (Jérémie Renier) to get her Belgium citizenship, and then she divorces and marries the Russian Andrei (Anton Yakovlev) to get him a euro passport. Andrei is a cigarette smuggler and needs the passport to push his wares and he is paying big money to get it. Finally, there is Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), the cab driver who is the brains behind the operation.

 

It all seems easy and appears to be going smoothly until Lorna gets a conscience. Claudy is a heroine addict, in fact, that is why he was chosen to be the person for Lorna to marry. The problems all start when Claudy decides that he wants to quit heroine and elicits Lorna to help him. Fabio isn’t happy, as a drugged up Claudy makes ending the marriage that much easier. He wants Claudy to stay on the drugs and Lorna wants to help him get clean. She goes from not caring for Claudy to helping in his recovery.
 

This film has the same problem other foreign films with subtitles have, sometimes the meaning gets lost in the translation. Throughout the movie there were a places where I wasn’t sure what had happened. If you misread or just plain missed a piece of dialog, an entire part of the film you can get quickly lost. It felt like one of the main plot points suffers from this, you aren’t really sure what to believe.

 

The movie was written, directed, and produced by the popular Dardenne brothers. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are well known and critically acclaimed Belgian filmmakers. Their stories aren’t about the big people in the world, but about the rest of the people.  Like in this movie, we have a drug addict, a dry cleaning worker (Lorna), a cab driver (Fabio) and a migrant worker of some kind (Sokol), not your normal cast of characters.

 

The movie stands apart from American films in the way it was shot. American movies with similar convoluted schemes would have some violence, or yelling, or action and that wasn’t the case with this at all. This movie was understated in its presentation and almost fooled you into thinking that every character is nice and polite. I’m not sure how much of that was the Dardenne brothers themselves, or just the euro style of filming.

 

As always, it’s a pleasure to see any part of another country. I always enjoy watching for foreign films for that if for no other reason. I really found it interesting that there are call centers in Belgium for you to place private, anonymous calls.

 

I liked the movie, but thought it was slow in some parts. In other parts, the movie skipped events in a way I wasn’t used too. Overall, it was an enjoyable movie. I give it a 2.5 out of 5 stars.