LORNA’S SILENCE written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, with Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier and Fabrizio Rongione. An E1 Entertainment release. 105 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (August 28) at the Royal. See Indie & Rep Film listings.
Cannes – It’s the day after the black-tie premiere of Lorna’s Silence at Cannes 2008, and the film’s directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, are meeting the press in the Unifrance tent just a few feet from the beach.[briefbreeak][rssbreak]
It’s a world away from the film’s dreary setting in Liège, where an Albanian emigrée (Arta Dobroshi) goes to increasingly complicated lengths to extract herself as painlessly as possible from her green-card marriage to a clinging Belgian junkie (Jérémie Renier).
Everyone wants to know where they found the stunning Dobroshi, who seems poised to become one of the festival’s breakout stars.
“We needed someone outside of the European Union,” explains Luc, the more talkative of the brothers, through a translator. “Someone who would [sound like she needed] a marriage for papers otherwise, the plot doesn’t work. We held auditions in Ukraine, Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia. We found Arta, who had done a few films in Albania. She had to learn French very quickly, but she was great.”
Economics are a key factor in the Dardennes’ films, to the point where characters can be defined more by their financial standing than by their relationship to one another.
“Money is definitely a character in the film,” Luc says, “and a complicated one. On the one hand, money can be used for power, as a tool to dominate and manipulate people. But it also has a positive side. When Claudy gives Lorna his money, he’s trusting her to help him get clean, and Lorna can see his humanity.”
I ask the Dardennes about the distinction between the way their Belgian characters see the world and the way the foreign characters see it. In the film, it seems, the Belgians fix problems by throwing money at them Lorna and her associates, in turn, create problems in order to be bought off.
“We hadn’t thought of that before,” Luc says, “this contrast that you’re drawing.”
And then, to everyone’s surprise, Jean-Pierre pipes up.
“In fact, Claudy is like the other characters,” he says. “He was looking for this fake marriage initially because it would give him easy money to buy drugs. But then, because he finds that with Lorna he can perhaps see a better future for himself, his plans change – which backfires on the other characters, because they just expected him to go straight down into a hole. Instead, he’s been given hope he can aspire to something better, and that foils the plans for the others. So basically he’s in the same boat.”
And how does it feel to bring their movies to Cannes, where audiences in tuxes and evening gowns pay exorbitant amounts to watch their desperate, impoverished characters?
“The fancy dress and all that is the protocol for the screenings,” says Luc. “We here sitting around this table are not so bling-bling, just people talking about film. The glamorous side is not so much the reality we’re experiencing here in Cannes. Of course, that being said, our characters probably don’t go to the movies.”
normw@nowtoronto.com
