It seems almost impossible to talk about this (or any Dardennes Brothers) film without referencing their previous films because they, like Wong Kar Wai, have both an extremely distinctive visual style and thematic concepts running throughout their entire body of work. Basically, in any Dardennes movie you will have someone, usually on the fringes of society, pushed into a moral dilemma, all the while shot with extremely rough handheld camerawork (In The Son one might be forgiven for mistaking it as an ode to the back of Olivier Gourmet's head  ). They've enjoyed a very successful career artistically, they are now Cannes regulars, having won the Palme D'or twice for Rosetta and L'Enfant.

The first notable thing about their latest film, Lorna's Silence, is the softening of the visual style. It's still all handheld but the grittiness and ultra-documentary feel which has been characteristic of their work in their last 4 films at least has been distilled. It doesn't make the film better or worse, it's merely an observation. The second change to what we might expect is that the script is incredibly plot heavy for them. Usually a Dardennes film will be all character and a very simple scenario (be it a man selling his baby in The Child or what have you), but in this they have a very convoluted set up. It's about an Albanian woman who is married to a drug addict to get Belgian citizenship, which she then intends to take advantage of by marrying a Russian man for money so she and her boyfriend () can set up a cafe bar, but then there's still the problem of what to do with the drug addict because the local mobster engineering all this () wants to kill him via an overdose rather than allowing a quickie divorce (which is the woman's preferred option).

Arta Dobroshi

The subtitles I had for this film were beyond atrocious but only half of the confusion was down to that. The almost labyrinthine plot (which has no set up, as per usual Dardennes-style, they just drop you in the middle of it all) is not helped at all by two things. Firstly the characterisation, usually such a rock-solid calling card of the directors, is very messy and doesn't help the believability of the situation. When our woman (played by Arta Dobroshi) changes her mind about things they're always out of the blue and haven't been drip-fed enough to keep up with the plot. The second problem is the inclusion of an "ellipsis", which is basically deliberately removing a key scene in the narrative (think No Country for Old Men). Doing this, it doesn't benefit the film at all, all it does is make an already complicated set up with dodgy characterisation even more confusing because they haven't shown the pivotal scene in the story and it needlessly confuses things. The only thing the audience gets out of this is 5 or 10 minutes of "what the hell is going on?" and it takes you out of the moment and makes you analyse the film when surely you should be lost in the story.

All of this is a monumental shame because it could be a good film, the writing would always prevent it from being great, but there is a lot of interesting stuff going on which is just sabotaged by the way it's presented. The acting is uniformly good, Dobroshi doesn't have a tremendous amount to do but does well with what she has but again, the script cuts her off at the knees because she isn't *so* good that she can overcome the leaps in characterisation she is asked to do. What this feels like is if the Coen Brothers were trying to do a Dardennes Brothers film, you've got the hand held camera and the moralistic story but it feels like an imitation with more commercial techniques added to their usual kind of story which only causes problems because they don't fit. It's an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying half-breed of a film and given the filmmakers' talent and reputation, it's very disappointing.