Cannes fashion report: This year European women are doing black tights and doing them all wrong. Tights are of a piece with long-legged American athleticism, and the dance/gym/fitness lifestyle -- so Old Europe should leave them alone, and just stick with those weird potions to fight cellulite. And what's with all the French women of a certain age sighted on the Rue d'Antibes, who dress like modish teen-agers? Or what the French call "les fashion victimes"?
Cannes quality-of-life report: This village wasn't built for such crowds and simply implodes. Cars and assorted vehicles come so close to walkers, the fenders graze your thighs. At every intersection you get to play chicken with kamikazis hunched over the wheel. Civility bit the dust during the stampede to enter the screening of
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by Steven
Spielberg, with reports of journos shouting and shoving to get in. Add to that, rumors at large of an Air France strike. I mean, I'm 100% behind the workers, only not when I'm trying to go home, please!
Well, you know where the sympathies of the
Dardenne brothers would lie.
Lorna's Silence (pictured) by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne opened to fewer cheers than previous efforts, and from the trades only qualified praise. Yet despite a rather long, complicated exposition, this impeccably composed film offers a moving portrait of a woman torn apart by the need to survive. Hoping to open a snack bar with her boyfriend, Lorna, a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, becomes embroiled in a scheme to make money by organizing sham marriges with foreigners. When she unexpectedly forms a passionate bond with her junkie Belgian "husband," she's forced to choose between her original dream and the need for redemption.
In focusing on the plight of illegal aliens,
Lorna's Silence marks a return to the Dardennes' 1996
La Promesse. In a scene similiar to the earlier film (remember
Olivier Gourmet trying to jolly up son
Jeremie Renier, who has just witnessed the quasi-murder of an African immigrant?), Lorna blithely searches for snack bar locations, briefly oblivious to having sold her soul. But in the universe of the Dardennes, the most debased person reaches a juncture where, propelled by a force perhaps resembling grace, they choose the right thing, even at great cost to themselves.
Unlike the earlier films, though,
Lorna's Silence was shot in 35mm with a less mobile camera and wider frames. "We had decided that this time round, the camera would not be constantly moving, would be less descriptive, and limited to recording images." Also, there's a haunting new mystical element to
Lorna involving a pregnancy that may be real or imagined, and signals the persistence of hope. At a roundtable with the Dardennes, I asked whether they intended a specifically Christian message. No, just a human one, they replied, though I remain unconvinced.
# posted by Erica Abeel @ 5/21/2008 10:39:00 AM
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