Chattanooga Pulse

The Carmike Bijou will close its doors at the end of this week and Chattanooga will say hello to the beautiful new 12-screen Majestic next door.  The Majestic is the nation’s first LEED-certified “green” cinema and includes a VIP theater and Ovation Room complete with gourmet food and electronic reclining chairs.

The Arts and Education Council has one more film planned to screen on the tattered screens of the Bijou as part of the fall Independent Film Series and it is one of the most acclaimed of the season—Lorna’s Silence, a film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

The brothers Dardenne are some of the most notable filmmakers working today.  They come out of a rich tradition of European filmmaking and their films will no doubt be catalogued on lists alongside the best of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Carl Th. Dreyer in the near future.

They have crafted a vigorously naturalistic film aesthetic that has garnered their films many prizes at the Cannes Film Festival including the Palme d’Or in 1999 and 2002 for their films Rosetta and L’Enfant (The Child).

The bulk of their work focuses on young people teetering on the edge of society in lower-class Belgium.  Their latest film is the story of a young Albanian woman named Lorna who plans on opening a snack bar in Belgium with her boyfriend Sokol.  Before Lorna can open her doors, she unwittingly becomes an accomplice in the infernal plans of a mobster named Fabio—plans that attempt to strip her of her identity and her humanity.

It would be unwise to summarize the plot any further because Dardenne films hinge on moments of surprise.  By this, I don’t mean jump scenes or revelatory plot twists—the very concept is far too American—but intensely personal emotional revelations that change our perceptions of the internal lives of the characters.  The apparent story of a Dardenne film is simple and very important, but the internal struggles of the characters are what make their films so unique.

In addition to the handheld camera, another reason a Dardenne film feels so natural is their method of working with actors.  When filming begins, the brothers don’t feel pressure to direct their actors exactly the way they have rehearsed things.

“We pretend that we are starting over from zero so that we can rediscover things that we did before,” said Luc Dardenne in an interview with Cinéaste Magazine.  “The instructions we give the actors are above all physical. We start working without the cameraman—just the actors and my brother and me. We walk them through the blocking [and they] say but do not act their lines. We do not tell them what the tone of their lines should be.”  The directors then bring the camera in and shoot the scene in one long take, allowing them to subsequently modify details.

Their signature method of approaching moral, spiritual, and psychological dilemmas is breathlessly subtle and provoking, even if one does not agree with their conclusions.  Each film in their constantly expanding oeuvre is morally undergirded (yet never preachy) and deftly gives testimony to the human need for absolution and repentance.

“[Lorna’s Silence is] about a young woman who has every reason to be desperate and who continues to believe that everything is possible,” concludes Luc Dardenne in the film’s press kit.  “How can a woman who doesn’t believe in God believe everything is possible? Where does this crazy hope come from?”
These are the questions of Lorna’s Silence, the Dardenne Brothers’ story of a young woman caught between love and a world of crime and deception.