Lorna's Silence (2008)

  Damn, the Dardenne brothers make fine films. Lorna’s Silence is a placid recording of a woman’s power — but mainly its restriction — with roiling turmoil beneath its surface. It’s challenging to watch because no character invites — or even allows — our emotional identification. Even at the end.

Our obvious impulse is to side with Lorna. The Albanian woman paid the Belgian Claudy to marry her so she could gain Belgian citizenship. That established, she can now get a bank loan so she and her lover Sokol can open their own snack bar. 

Still, they need the $10,000 a Russian will pay to marry Lorna to win Belgian citizenship himself. To rid herself of Claudy Lorna offers him $5,000 for a divorce and fakes his assaulting her as grounds. Despite the obvious tensions in their homelife she tries to help him break his serious drug habit. In one desperate intervention she gets him through withdrawal by having sex.

These citizenship finaglings are orchestrated by the wannabe gang bass Fabio. With his taxi driver front, we are not surprised to find him taking Lorna for a ride. While she only wants Claudy divorced, Favio rigs Claudy’s murder as an overdose. The run of coarse love never does smooth true. 

For all her power in marital citizenship Lorna is radically helpless. Not entirely unlike reality, here men wield the authority and compel the woman’s silence. Fabio runs the show. Even her financial gains are illusory. Fabio retracts his payments when Lorna breaks the Russian deal. Worse, Sokol proves a false lover when he takes back his investment in their project and unconvincingly pledges to meet her in Albania.  

For all her sympathetic efforts to dump Claudy by legal means, she feels guilty at his death. She declines to dispel the cops’ assumption of suicide. Her silence has been an immoral compliance. Powerless in reality, she finds a moral peace in imagining she is carrying Claudy’s child. That possibility shivers the Russian deal and breaks Fabio’s support. 

At the end his henchman is clearly driving her to death. When she flees him she ends up powerless, helpless, doomed — with not even her purse. She hides in an abandoned shack in the forest.  Her fantasy of carrying Claudy’s child is her only sustenance — and an expression of her will and moral responsibility that had been silenced too long. This final delusion allows her a cleansing her reality denied.

Indeed cleansing may be the film’s underpinning metaphor. Lorna works in a dry cleaning business. The staff’s uniforms are nurse-like white. Lorna uses the hospital setting to back up her domestic violence suit against Claudy. She buries her dirty money, then tries to cleanse it by giving it to Claudy’s alienated family. Even the film’s palette serves the metaphor, with its bright patches — whether the blue in the opening shot or Lorna’s wardrobe reds — an arresting relief against the dark background. The colour feels bracing, like a mouthwash.

Indeed, isn’t all that business about getting citizenship through marriage a political form of cleansing, a superficial legitimizing? Only in her final and fatal isolation, with that delusion of continuing Claudy through their imaginary child, can she feel finally “clean.” That’s her tacit scream against her lifelong silence..