Le Silence de Lorna

I had to sit in the front row of the orchestra section this time; the theatre was overflowing. The directors of Le Silence de Lorna, the Dardenne brothers, have won the Palm D'Or twice before, and I think people are so excited about the film because they believe it has a very good chance of nabbing the prize again. The film follows a young Albanian woman who attains Belgian citizenship to set up a snack shop with her German boyfriend by marrying a Belgian-born junkie, Claudy, a transaction arranged by the diabolical mobster/taxi driver Fabio. When Fabio forces Lorna to divorce him and marry a Russian hoping to attain citizenship to pay for her marriage to Claudy, things go horribly wrong as she realizes the implications of becoming involved in organized crime. As in Serbis, all the men turn out to be completely inhumane bar one, and Lorna is psychologically destroyed by their greed and selfishness.


The original score, used sporadically throughout the film, differentiates it slightly from the others, but by the time I sat down to see this one this morning, I had gotten pretty sick of that handheld/long tracking shot aesthetic. It just seems so formulaic now; all of the competition films look very similar, right down to the one extreme close up each throws in. There seems to be this criterion one must adhere to to get a film into Cannes; non-invasive documentary style, dark, in media res opening, no voice over, no shot-reverse-shot, no close-ups (except of boils and the like), and everyone has to get naked. The aesthetics of Blindness are different, and I'm guessing that can be explained by its unique perspective. There is a whole other ideology that filmmakers here subscribe to, while claiming to be anti-ideology. I also don't understand why their goal is to make the camera invisible for that documentary feel, while in every shot the frame shakes like it's having a seizure, making its presence known. Every film I've seen in competition tries to walk that line, but the real/unreal visible/invisible dichotomy schtik gets tiresome and repetitive after a couple of films.

I liked this film better than Gomorra, but couldn’t like it too much due to its similarities to the other films I had already seen. If you haven’t been watching a string of Cannes competition features, however, I'm sure that it would be much more enjoyable.