Lorna’s Silence
Directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & Cinema Village
Runtime: 105 min.

BELGIAN FILM TEAM Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne do small things profoundly.Their new movie, titled Lorna’s Silence, makes its strongest, most persuasive moments when Albanian immigrant Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) silently weighs her options and her moral choices.

She marries a Belgian junkie (Jérémie Renier) to get citizenship status, then parlays that into a criminal scheme to marry a Russian mobster. Lorna may be illegiti mate, but she’s not corrupt. Her quiet tension is the Dardenne brothers’ dramatization of human struggle.

Throughout the Dardennes’ measured, meticulously casual method—a post-doc, quasi-realism where most action happens in non-intrusive two-shots, wide shots or off-camera—one may tire of such stylistic nobility and desire more emphatic visual poetry. I longed to hear gifted Belgian singer An Pierlé’s emotive hit single, “How Does It Feel?” for its equivalent but plangent expression of a woman’s deep empathy.

Dobroshi’s Lorna lacks Pierlé’s consummate melodrama, although her dark-haired beauty is vividly expressive.The Dardennes won’t allow emotional excess, so Dobroshi discreetly balances compassion and dissatisfaction.

Lorna’s need for money is a means toward contentment.This is better than the Dardennes’ The Child, an intelligent but dismal critique of the new European economy where a young father willingly sold his new infant. By now, the Dardennes’ scrutiny of modern social horrors is starting to feel almost complacent in its cautious distance.Their technique—brilliant elision of a murder scene actually accentuates Lorna’s compassion—is more honest and perceptive than contrived nightmare scenarios—such as Tony Manero and last year’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—that cater to art-film pessimism.The Dardennes don’t go there; yet they’re nearly as drab. When Lorna’s pimp tells her “You shouldn’t worry about it, a junkie prefers drugs to life,” it recalled the misconception in Kathryn Bigelow’s now overrated The Hurt Locker that “war is a drug.”The pimp’s alibi is another art-movie fallacy.

Surely the Dardennes know better, yet they make it easier to accept cynicism than to trust sentiment or full-out emotion.Their astute social analyses could also help us understand desperate straits in white-collar life and add variety to their celebrated filmography.

Otherwise, a film as moving as Lorna’s Silence starts to resemble underclass condescension.