Lorna's Marriage

&   Liminality of life in Exile

          Dardenne brothers are not immigrant producers; they are EU citizens born in Belgium. They portray the story of an non-EU citizen woman who goes through situations that happen to 21st century immigrant people like her. Due to her social situation she is more ready to do things that other people would not, because they have no need to. 

   

  In Lorna’s Silence the Dardenne brothers sympathize with the reality that non-EU immigrants may be forced to go through in order to attain the dreams they attempt to reach. Although the Dardenne film directors are not immigrants themselves, as is common on directors of the cinema of the diaspora, Lorna’s Silence represents the cinema of exile in a number of ways. They, as émigrés directors do, operate independently and their film does not fit into any generic or typological category. Lorna’s Silence is not a diaspora film in the sense of having been produced in exile, but it thematically deals with central issues of displacement and with characters who live in exile. 

         Lorna’s Silence narrates the story of the global subject of the century; migration, such as the cinema of despair does.

     Small-time gangsters contract a young Belgian, Claudy (Jérémie Renier) to marry Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) for 5,000eu so she can become an EU citizen, for later divorce him, and marry a Russian mobster to become an EU citizen too, for then she can divorce him to finally marry his long-distance chauffeur boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj) and live forever after.

      It sounds effortless and a all-winners plan so far. Everyone have its own dream to better their life, and diplomatically agree to use each other for their own benefit.

         Lorna has the modest dream of opening a snack bar with her boyfriend, but as the few obstacles she'll encounters soon multiply, she'll never attain it, because life wasn’t just designed to be lived in a so selfish fashion. 

       Claudy is a heroin-dependent man, and at first, Lorna regards him with polite contempt. And although she lives in his flat, she treats him as an annoying tenant, setting down rules of clear separation. Soon she'll feel more sympathy as Claudy tries to kick his addiction. When he becomes a real a burden, she does everything she can to accelerate the divorce proceedings, such as hurting her body in order to file the case for domestic violence. As the attainment of the divorce certificate takes time, her accomplices plan to rush things up by killing Claudy with an overdose (Thom Andersen). 

Hard men, indeed. 

      Gangsters walk in Claudy's apartment as if they own Lorna’s life and her destiny, and go over the deceased’s belongings like vultures on carrion splitting his personal effects.

     Lorna now in a round table with the gangsters and her prospective russian husband listens instruction for the meeting to settle the marriage arrangements including paid witnesses. But now is Lorna the one who became the problem; sunk on guilt for Claudy's death, she believes is pregnant, and at attempting to find out whether the Russian would accept her in this condition, the russian cancels the deal.

Furious gangsters and boyfriend redirect Lorna’s collected funds back to each other and send her back immediately to her homeland, Albania. Fugitive, she lives insane, abandoned, and isolated in the woods. 

'Freedom' in Lorna’s story means being the designer and commander of your life. Characters lose their dreams, but Lorna discovers another kind of freedom in the woods outside Liège. 

         According to Naficy on his works on ‘Recurrent Themes in the Middle Eastern Cinema of Diaspora’, diaspora cinema is structurally contradictory because is both; oppositional and assimilionist. Lorna’s Silence is oppositional in its critique of the politics, policies and ideologies of the host societies; Lorna makes of matrimony a commerce in order to get her freedom in the hosting land. Lorna deals with the marginalia of the host society to close her business; in this sense the film is assimilionist, if marginal, function as a cultural force within the civil society. 

      The Dardenne brothers, by producing film about exiles, intervene in the larger discourses and debates of host societies, and reinforce the prevailing negative representations of EU countries as elitist societies. At the same time, according to Naficy, through this representation they help the community to identify and negotiate for themselves new individual and collective identities, facilitating their move from being ‘exiles’ to become ‘ethnics’. At the same time, by focusing on problems of living and working in big cities, the film addresses to immigrant tensions and concerns participating in means of self-assertion, self-fashioning and acculturation (Naficy, 1995). 

      Differently to the immigrants to America at the end of the 19th century that move from Europe, where woman, barred from participating in the public sphere of the times, worked at home and kept their families together, caring and nurturing family members creating ethnic linkages and networks with other immigrant populations. Instead, 21st century immigrant Lorna, is attached to the petty ruffians who help her business. They rather represent an advanced stage of capitalist development; Lorna and her associates are all business individuals: no small talk, no charm, no colorful lines, no philosophical speculations. There’s work to be done, and they’re doing it as efficiently as possible, with harsh attention to detail. Even Lorna’s Albanian boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), a long-distance truck driver, is always preoccupied with some obscure criminal endeavor during their rushed encounters (Thom Andersen).

       Nothing about nurturing and cultivation mirrors Lorna: although her fake husband and heroin addict Claudy begs for affection in many ways, and his longings are strengthened as he tries to kick his addiction, Lorna shows incapable to provide nurture, care, nor even sympathy because her chances of obtaining a divorce would be even closer if she became a widow. 

       So, while waiting for the divorce letter, the minute that Lorna gets to her living place she closes every window and lacks herself in the bedroom. Claudy, sick in a never-ending rotation of helpless misery, burning his money-share in drugs, starves for attention and care. Attempting to kick the drug habit becomes a problem when he reaches an edging desperate need. It’s not that he grew affection for her or anything but it’s more that she has what he lacks; a plan, hope, that freshness when she passes by, so healthy and desirable, so alive... and at the same time so selfish, so careless, unsociable and inhuman that at some point you may feel you hate her. She tries to stick to the original business plan where “helping” was not part of the contract (he received €5000 for marrying her and will receive the double to divorce her). That was all. 

       Immigrant Lorna lives in a den where minimal furniture populates the rooms, and white washed walls have nothing to say but that its tenants are not building a home there. Theirs, is and interior den where they can’t get out. They force to live a miserable life, victims of themselves. All characters will live a life when they reach their dreams; meanwhile they're just wrecked people that wait to get there. These are the signs of homelessness that characterize the lives of those exiles who find a way to escape from life pressures by dreaming with ‘another place’ yet to achieve. 

      Potentially liminal spaces are mobile entities such as buses, tracks or trains that transit between homeland and other destinations in the films of diaspora. Lorna’s boyfriend waits to obtain EU citizenship while working as a long-distance truck driver. When Lorna is finally sent to her homeland Albania, her boyfriend assures her that both will meet there after stopping in Milan. These transitional and mobile sites are potentially liminal and highly suggestive of the exile condition. 

     Nothing is referred in the film about the place where Lorna and her associates came from other than they came from Albania, and nothing is referred in the film addressed to an integrative cultural struggle in the host society because global media has taken care of that ahead of time. Bizarrely enough, the novel immigrant of the 21st century will struggle for assimilation and acculturation after they have obtained their citizenship, and not the other way around. In Lorna's Silence, immigrant characters won't be granted citizenship after they become assimilated and integrated to the new society because unlike the 19th century immigrant, in the 21st century, the acquirement of citizenship is a prior step in the path to integration. This is reflected during the first seconds of the film when Lorna interacts with a bank clerk asking for the loan to open the snack bar saying ‘I’ll be Belgian soon, so I can do it’ (1:15). 

      One similitude of these two types of immigrants is that nothing is said about their affective relationship with their home country (although negation is anyhow rejection). The devotion to the new country, the minor-league hoodlums will do anything to advance their schemes. 

       The immigrants that the Dardenne brothers portrait, are somehow more related to the second wave of immigrants America had around the 1960 which came from Third World and the newly industrialized nations. They had a higher level of education, skills and capital and a desire to neither give-up the ‘old ways’ nor completely embrace the new ones. The only way that Lorna shows that she has not given-up ways from her homeland is when she desires her Albanian boyfriend Sokol; her desire of building a new life in Belgium with him is a desire to extend her Albanian way of life in the new land. And the way Lorna shows that she has not embraced the new ways of life is the ways she connects with her environment; except for the nurse that helps her to declare her self-inflicted bruises to the police, other surrounding people from her workplace, hospital, streets, pharmacy, bank clerk and detectives are unidentified, anonymous and vacant to her life. She is cut-off from her environment that is indifferent to her presence; she only performs. 

      The liminality of exile necessitate a stress on nature and the natural order; In the absence of the native habitat the exiles seek what only nature is capable of providing: wilderness, timelessness, boundlessness, reliability, stability, and universality. Many exiles in cinema consider wilderness to be a sacred space of uncontaminated spirituality and safety: during Lorna’s final escape from her masters, a hint of realism is introduced when she comes upon an abandoned cabin in the forest, as well as a bit of music. This space is contrasted with the profane and insecure spaces of culture and civilization. In the forest, all of a sudden Lorna regain her woman nurturing nature; there she remembers how was to be maternal and to take care of someone, but is late because Claudy is dead and out of guilt she has a psychological pregnancy.
Then there is a profound sense of loss; the dead and the lost dream are symbols of an unattainable life. The wilderness in Lorna’s also represents a space of liberation and reconciliation. 

      In the liminality of diaspora and exile, the boundaries between self and other, female and male, inside and outside are often blurred and must be continually negotiated (Naficy, 1995) . The spatial configuration in Lorna’s Silence is driven by structures of identification and alienation. In the exilic films as Lorna’s the enclosed claustrophobic spaces as her bedroom and place of residence represents a prison expressing anxiety and fear about life in exile. These phobic spaces perceived as representations of an hostile, oppressive social order are often opposed to the spaces of immensity of the wilderness. Strategies to create such spaces in Lorna’s include tight close-ups, closed shot compositions, tight physical spaces, barriers in the mise-en-scene and the shot that impedes vision such as car passing by while she walks on the streets, a net-metal curtain between Lorna and the pharmacist, dialogs inside cars while characters deal large quantity of cash, etc. And a lightning scheme that creates a mood of constriction such as the lightning in her apartment, her rushes through the night and the all-cloudy days during the exteriors daytime locations.

      In Lorna’s Silence, the security that the confinement of her apartment offers her, although violent and degrading far outweigh the external world of the host society, which remains a threatening presence. This is shown in how she looks at strangers in the street throughout the film and the fear she feels at seeing police officers passing by and when addressing to the pharmacist; as if she wouldn’t feel with the full right of being there. 

      Another key of most exilic filmmakers of the accented cinema is that they are multilingual, as Lorna speaks French with society but Albanian with her boyfriend Sokol, who at the same time speaks Italian with his associate for language, serves to shape not only individual identity but also regional and national identities prior to displacement (Naficy, 2001). 

      Common elements of exilic films that are found in Lorna’s are keys, that close and open different worlds and represent immigrant’s opportunities to succeed, huge amounts of cash movements that represent unsettling since citizens don’t need to carry so much cash, police, panic to doorbells, the closing of curtains as protection from the external world and isolation in the new land, the nearness to death, the fear to be continually under surveillance, visits to hospitals, close spaces and frequent moving as when after Claudy died Lorna moved quickly to her former flat. 

  

      According to Deleuze, in the cinema of the “action-image”, “perception is organized in obstacles and distances to be crossed, while action invents the means to cross and surmount them.” In the modern cinema “perceptions and actions cease to be linked together.” A link has been broken, and the character can no longer act effectively. But Lorna is not a neorealist character; her perceptions lead her immediately to actions; there is no dissociation between them. Against the tide of neorealism, the Dardennes insist that action is character.

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