Keswick Film Club - The Silence of Lorna

Synopsis

The film is set in Liège (Belgium), their familiar home town, but this is new territory for the Dardenne brothers (Rosetta, Le Fils, L’Enfant), in that it is more like a thriller than anything they have done before. And the brothers take to making telling moral points about the murky underside of European affluence in this quicker-paced tale of immigration, centring on the title character, a courageous Albanian immigrant played by Arta Dobroshi. There’s a series of tricky narrative revelations and switchbacks, involving a low-life local mobster (Fabrizio Rongione) in a conspiracy to murder Lorna’s pathetic junkie husband, Claudy (Dardenne regular Jérémie Renier), but feelings can change and Lorna is stretched in different directions by the hand of fate.

Winner, Best Screenplay, Cannes 2008.