Cannes. Lorna's Silence.

Glenn Kenny finds Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Le Silence de Lorna "every bit as nuanced, surprising, and deeply moving" as their 2005 Palme d'Or-winning L'Enfant.

"[T]heir approach to storytelling isn't as Bresson-inflectedly-idiosyncratic as some might tell you. Which is my hifalutin way of professing that Lorna is an entirely accessible film, one that moviegoers who like a nice juicy tale ought not be scared of."

Updated through 5/23.

"Few directors offer the patient viewer such consummate rewards as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, longtime documakers whose uncompromising, beautifully observed studies of Belgium's urban poor (including Palme d'Or winners Rosetta and L'Enfant) reveal a peerless talent for conjuring drama out of the mundane and wresting emotion from determinedly unsentimental material," writes Justin Chang in Variety. "Lorna's Silence is their first feature not set in their hometown, Seraing, but rather in the more densely populated city of Liege - a logical backdrop for a tale of hard-scrabble immigrants trying to secure their livelihoods through less-than-honest means."

"Fake marriages undertaken to get Belgian citizenship are the subject of the Dardenne brothers' latest drama, which starts as rivetingly as any of their films and then, an hour in, spins into an unexpected and unsatisfying direction," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen Daily. "Needless to say, the acting is fine. Kosovo-born [Atra] Dobroshi is luminous in a largely silent performance as the crumbling Lorna, and Dardenne regular [Jérémie] Renier is always compelling."

Eugene Hernandez has a snapshot and a few quotes from the press conference.

Competing.

Updates: "I was close to enraged by the actions of Arta Dobroshi's main character in La Silence de Lorna," writes Jeffrey Wells. "Which means I felt strongly irked by the Dardenne brothers' screenplay. Which means, despite the feeling and focus that went into it, that I didn't care for the film. At all."

"The sense of revelation may not be there as it was with Rosetta," blogs Jonathan Romney for the Independent, "and the jurors may well be looking for something bigger and more of a statement - and there's no shortage of films like that in competition this year. But as a film that's very much about the new Europe, and the street-level problems that rarely get covered in film, Lorna certainly commands attention."

"On the one hand, it's good to see the Dardennes trying something new, something beyond their normal cast of working-class Belgian feckless ne'er-do-wells," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. "On the other hand, it feels like they don't really know this new territory very well - neither in terms of the novel characters they're using, or the physical move to Liege from Seraing, the industrial town in which all their previous films have been set - giving Le Silence de Lorna a highly derivative feel. Throw an Italian mobster and a Russian mafioso into the mix, and the resulting stew feels very foreign indeed."

"[T]his new tale of immigration, sham marriages, heroin and murder strikes me as an intriguing misfire," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "The Dardennes' vision of downscale Liège is as intimate as ever - or as intimate as an anonymous middle-Europe of bus stations, hospitals, laundries and post-war apartment buildings can get - and the movie's mini-shocks are coolly effective. Dobroshi gives a brave and affecting performance, but there's something mechanistic and even cruel about Lorna's Silence, which is more like a thriller than any previous Dardenne film, and correspondingly a lot less plausible. Whatever moral points it's trying to make about the underside of European affluence are uncharacteristically murky."

Updates, 5/20: "Dobroshi is a revelation as the eyes-on-the-prize woman who finds her life spiralling out of control almost as much as that of the drug addict whom she had initially scorned," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "Renier has an amazing ability to give humanity to loser characters. Their scratchy relationship may seem implausible on paper, but because of terrific performances rings utterly true on screen."

"The Dardennes use the speed, movement and volatility of the handheld, mobile camera to examine interior consciousness," writes Patrick Z McGavin in Stop Smiling. "Their scenes play out in short burst of duration, with little cutting, the drama established in the tense relationship between the actors' bodies and the cameras.... Lorna's Silence is subtle, compelling and tense, but it's also a little limited to the point where I wish the Dardennes would push their work toward the unexplored."

For Anthony Kaufman, writing at indieWIRE, "the film doesn't have the raw, relentless energy of Rosetta or the powerfully redemptive climax of L'Enfant. To be sure, the film remains urgent and affecting, Lorna's growing sense of guilt and grief beautifully crescendos after some surprising turns of plot, and Dardennes newbies would certainly find in Lorna's Silence a bracing, delicate and profound human drama. But the prevailing sentiment among critics here is that Lorna's Silence doesn't have the same gut-wrenching kick as their previous work."

"It's not top-drawer Dardenne - the necessary tending to plot seems to have dulled their focus a bit - but it's quite good," blogs the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

Updates, 5/21: Fabien Lemercier has a brief talk with the Dardennes for Cineuropa.

"The film is an improvement on the formulaic L'Enfant and boasts an impressively naturalistic performance by Dobroshi, who could win the Best Actress award," writes Mary Corliss for Time.

Update, 5/22: Erica Abeel talks with the Dardennes for the IFC.

Update, 5/23: "The turn that the narrative eventually takes, while subtly and gracefully executed, yanks the film out of the realm of real life and into that of movie-world fiction," writes Matt Noller at the House Next Door. "It's not a disastrous move, but L'Enfant and The Son were so unbearably moving precisely because their stories of guilt and redemption were so grounded in reality. With Le Silence de Lorna, the Dardennes have become victims of their own greatness. For any other directors, it would be a triumph; for them, it's a slight step back."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2008 8:52 AM