Directed by Luc and
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
(R)
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Lorna’s Silence is a “stunning study of one desperate woman’s conscience,” said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. In this “sociologically astute and amazingly naturalist drama,” Arta Dobroshi plays Lorna, an Albanian woman who agrees to not one, but two arranged marriages in order to gain Belgian citizenship, marry her boyfriend, and fulfill her modest dream of opening a cafe. Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are less interested in her complicated plan than in its effects on “the soul of the woman” hoping to gain from it, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. With a quiet, near-documentary style, the brothers keep a “cool, arm’s-length gaze that masks boundless compassion” for their underclass heroine. The fascination lies in how “sympathy slowly chips away at Lorna’s pose of self-interest, ennobling and ruining her at the same time.” Dobroshi proves arresting as a woman compromising her morals in the face of economic need, said Moira Macdonald in The Seattle Times. The Dardennes’ latest masterpiece is both a “slice of a life nobody would want and a portrait that’s not easy to forget.”
