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Lorna’s Silence
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Much of this film, like the work of the Dardennes in
general, is devoted, with great intensity, to the real-time performance of
gestural actions. Crossing a street, getting into and out of a car, pouring out
a cup of coffee: these gestures are here routinely invested with gauntlet-like
gravity.
Is it because a woman is again the central character
that Lorna’s Silence is the
Dardennes’ best film since the sublime Rosetta (1999)? Their
men are usually notable and uniquely individualised too; but I suspect there is
something in the brothers’ investment in the warrior-like actions of a modern
ordinary-extraordinary woman that takes them to a higher level in their art.
Be that as it may, Lorna’s
Silence is constructed systematically on the enigma of Lorna’s gestures
(and her various silences, too, for that matter): at what point does Body
determine personal Will, or Will determine Body? As we watch Lorna’s actions
unfold, we ask – literally micro-second by micro-second – what is going on.
Take the extraordinary scene in which, trying to save
her drug-addicted faux-husband (an almost unrecognisable Jérémie Renier) from
himself, Lorna locks them both in their small apartment, and then impulsively
throws the door key out the window – a whirlwind of drama, of exactly the kind Giorgio
Agamben has analysed in literature, in which the gesture completely rearranges
the lines of force in a scene, situation or plot. And then Lorna methodically
takes her clothes off, at first inexplicably, until she offers her nude body to
the man …
So much in the subsequent course of events spins out
from this instantaneous, almost irrational commitment on Lorna’s part to
certain movements and gestures – of aggression, protection, love and desire.
The Brisbane International Film Festival (where I
first saw this film) was fortunate to enjoy the generous words and presence of
the actor who brings Lorna to life on screen: Albanian-born Arta Dobroshi, surely
set for a great career after this veritable Bressonian transfiguration courtesy
of the Dardennes. Dobroshi told of the very exacting, lengthy rehearsal process
employed by the brothers, and the strict attention to the smallest gesture
(like where a salt-shaker is put down on the table). No improvisation, as such.
Far from feeling that two directors on the set is too many, she joked that, in
future, she would like three or more!
And she testified movingly to her need, as an actor,
to feel and believe exactly what Lorna feels or believes, not to cultivate a
distance or an ambiguity, even when that ambiguity (is Lorna really pregnant?)
suffuses the film and its meaning as a whole.
Dobroshi spoke of another of the film’s most striking
scenes: when, during an unexpected visitation and interrogation by two
policemen (one of them another Dardenne regular, Olivier Gourmet) concerning
the husband’s (off-screen) death, she suddenly “cracks” (as Dobroshi described
it) and begins crying. Crying through or for what – grief, guilt, the need to
confess, the stress of covering up? It is a virtuosic performance spectacle: the
character is acting (pretending,
lying, putting on face) inside the actor’s own acting … in the midst of that
there has to be a real-time crack: the tears must come.
The mystery of how an actor produces such an emotion at such a predetermined point in a scene – the eternal version of what Denis Diderot once pondered (rather disapprovingly) as the paradox of the actor – is not so far from the mystery of all our emotional outbursts. The emotion is both produced and real, intense and enigmatic, all at once. As Agamben mused: We are always more and less than ourselves.
MORE Dardenne brothers: Young Ahmed © Adrian Martin August 2008 |
