the miraculous child
by Douglas Messerli
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
(screenplay and directors) Le silence de
Lorna (Lorna's Silence) / 2008, released
in the US in 2009
As I described their work in two
films (L'Enfant and La Promesse) in My Year 2004, the Dardenne brothers combine Christian symbolism
with current social issues in a manner that is somewhat similar, as Kevin
Thomas of the Los Angeles Times
suggested, to the work Robert Bresson. And through the lens of immigrants and
petty criminals, their work also resonates with the outrageous moral fables of
Flannery O'Connor without her veneer of the grotesque.
The movie begins with Lorna depositing money into a savings account and inquiring about a loan. And throughout the movie one of the major actions of these characters, upon which the camera focuses time and again, is financial transactions, not only for daily purchases, but in Claudy's case—who asks that Lorna keep his paltry life savings—to keep his money safe from his drug habit. Both the temporary husband and wife see money as the route to their dreams and needs and are clearly willing to do most anything to obtain it. Lorna and her boyfriend Sokol, the latter of whom works as an itinerant day laborer participating in shady activities related to Fabio and his group, plan to use their money to buy a small food stand, one of the dozens throughout the city of Liège, where the film's action takes place. Claudy, who has been paid to marry her, however, suddenly decides to come clean, with her help, putting all of Fabio's plans in jeopardy.
Early in the film, Lorna appears quite impenetrable, a woman without
sentimentality, willing to do almost anything to achieve her goal. But as
Claudy sickens from withdrawal, she is affected by his passionate pleas for
help, and gradually awards him some attention, ultimately delivering him over
to the hospital for his cure. Now since he will not, apparently, die from his
habit, she attempts to get a quick divorce by painfully bruising herself in
almost comical runs against doorways and walls to prove that Claudy has beaten
her. Her visit to the police station enrages Fabio, however, who now fears the
police will suspect something and that it will further delay Lorna's marriage
to the Russian.
Visiting Claudy, she demands that he strike her in the presence of a
nurse. But the young man, despite his drug dependence, is a nonviolent being,
insisting he would never strike a woman and unable to do so when he tries to
enact her plot. It is this basic goodness in him that gradually begins to chip
away at Lorna's coldly calculated composure. And when Claudy returns home, she
chases the local drug dealer from her house and refuses to give Claudy back his
money for a purchase, fighting him to the floor, an encounter that ends with
the two engaged in intense sex.
The divorce decree has come through, but Fabio and the Russian cannot
wait. As Lorna returns to her menial day job at a cleaners, Claudy rides away
joyfully on his new bicycle, insisting Lorna keep his money in the envelope. In
the very next scene, we observe Lorna almost ritualistically folding and
packing away his clothing. Claudy, so the police report, has overdosed, which
we know was not an act of his own volition.
Soon after, as Lorna excitedly inspects her and Sokol's new café, she
finds herself unable to climb the stairs. It is evident that she is
pregnant—with Claudy's child! Her first instinct is the obvious one: she must
abort it. But in the Dardennes' films, nothing happens quite like one might
expect. At the clinic she panics even before they inspect her body. She bolts
from the place, reporting to Fabio that she will have a baby.
Fabio insists she will have an abortion the next day, but at the meeting
with the Russian Lorna is to marry, she dares to ask, through a translator,
what he might think if she had a baby. He is outraged, ready to renege on the
deal, until Fabio intercedes, insisting that she is not pregnant and will be
checked over a doctor as evidence! Later that night, Lorna collapses in painful
cramping, and is taken to the doctors, where they declare that, indeed, she is not pregnant, and suggest further tests.
A chance encounter with the nurse to whom she had first reported Claudy's
beating of her hints to Fabio that she is about to tell the truth. And he
rushes her from the hospital, insisting through an intervention with her
boyfriend Sokol, that it would be better for her to return to Albania. In the
end, both Lorna and Claudy have attempted, but been unable, to resist their own
moral values.
Stopping in the woods to pee, she grabs a large rock and, returning to
the car, dashes it into the head of her would-be assassin, racing into the
woods without a planned destination. Eventually she finds a small shed, which
she forces open and in which, after gathering wood, she starts a fire, speaking
to her child as she acts, something to the effect of "Perhaps tomorrow we
will find a friendly house, where they will feed us. Now we must sleep."
It is clear that, despite the desperation of her potential fate—she may
be seriously ill and is without a single possession—Lorna is determined to live
and bare her child. Is she deluded? Gone mad? Possibly. She has, however,
clearly been morally redeemed, has seen the error of her life and regretted her
actions. Like the mother of Christ, she has had, symbolically, to flee to
Egypt. But Lorna must escape even before
the child's birth, finding her own stable nonetheless. Miracles, so the
Dardennes suggest, are known to happen.
Los Angeles, August 9, 2009
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (August 2009)
Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer,
2012).
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
