HORSES OF GOD (2012)

After the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. people were quick to argue that the attackers in no way represented the downtrodden, as if to preempt anyone thinking of saying they must have had some sincere personal grievance, grounded in poverty, in order to do what they did. Not quite two years later a wave of suicide bombings swept Casablanca, the legendary city in the Kingdom of Morocco. Adapting a novel based on those attacks, French director Nabil Ayouch tells us that these terrorists were the downtrodden, products of progressive impoverishment in the no-hope environment of a metastasizing shantytown. With every jump of time in his story he shows us dauntingly how the shantytown has grown. His protagonists are virtual dead end kids and his story is something like the original Dead End Kids of 1930s Hollywood getting recruited into the German-American Bund or the Ku Klux Klan with Pat O'Brien egging them on and no one to show them the error of their ways.

Our main focus is on a trio of shantytown kids who age from boys to men: Hamid, the bicycle-chain swinging leader of the band, his younger brother Tarek, nicknamed "Yachine" after a famous Soviet soccer goalie, and Tarek's weakling buddy Nabil. In ancient kid-gang fashion they and the rest of their team are chased back to their own neighborhood by the other team, the skins to their shirts, after a game falls apart. From the beginning Nabil and Tarek are accused of being gay for each other -- in a horrific scene a drunken Hamid actually rapes Nabil as Tarek and their other pals watch stupefied --  and a certain panic about masculinity amid a greater physical intimacy than men share in the west informs the decisions they make as young men. They work as mechanics for a boorish garage owner while Hamid, who'd become a drug dealer, stews in stir for throwing a rock through a cop's car window on a dare. Hamid returns from prison apparently reformed, but now he's too neat looking and there's something sinister about his new seeming serenity. It soon becomes apparent that he's been "radicalized," to use the current buzzword, but to Ayouch it looks more like plain old brainwashing by a cult.

 

The evolution (or devolution?) of Hamid (Abdelilah Rachid)

Still, while Hamid has grown a little aloof from his family -- including an alcoholic dad, a trashy mom and another brother who's a little crazy about his radio -- he and his new buddies come in handy when Tarek and Nabil need to cover up Tarek's killing of their boss for having out-of-nowhere started fondling Nabil. Tarek feels obliged to these devout dudes, who are also kind of cool for knowing karate, but he also finds their disciplined activity filling a void in his life. His promises to become a life of action rather than mere being, action becoming more important than life, even if he does still pine a little for Ghislaine, the pretty girl from the embroidery school. Suddenly he seems even more radicalized than Hamid, and Hamid notices this to his dismay. 

 

What elevates Horses of God above a simple expose on the making of terrorists is Hamid's wavering development. It's a surprising twist if you were expecting Tarek, the good brother and our point-of-view character, to observe and/or oppose Hamid's radicalization. As Hamid, Abdelilah Rachid undergoes multiple transformations, from thug to true believer to something more ambivalent. It's not so much that he comes to doubt jihad as that he can't stand to see Tarek traveling this path. It's as if some older-brother protectiveness overrides his radicalization. For all we know he could die readily himself, but eventually he can't bear even to think about Tarek martyring himself. At the brink of doom he tries to dissuade Tarek from carrying out a bombing of a niteclub, only to have Tarek at long last step out of older brother's shadow by shoving him to the ground. The dynamics of their whole sad family make Horses something more than a political film. Because the characters are convincingly human, the stakes seem more real for the audience, especially as we see harmless-seeming people denounced for sin and apostasy and targeted for death for no good strategic reason.

The film closes on a despairingly Bruegelian note as a consummating explosion is seen only from a tremendous distance -- from one of the soccer fields where Hamid and Tarek played as boys, where the next generation of shantytown boys watches with short-lived fascination, little suspecting what the filmmakers suspect is their own dark destiny. The subject matter alone makes Horses of God necessary viewing in our time, but fortunately there's more than necessity to justify seeing it.

On the Big Screen: THE KID WITH A BIKE (Le Gamin au Velo, 2011)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make a certain kind of movie, but it's the kind of movie you don't often see in American multiplexes and the Belgian brothers do it well enough that it's worth seeing what they'll do next. After catching up with some of their work on DVD, I decided to see their newest effort on the big screen even though the Dardennes are arguably the opposite of spectacle makers. They're lean naturalists concerned with low life at or near the fringes of society. Their interest is sympathetic rather than exploitative and the results look and feel authentic. I get a better sense of being in another world from their pictures than from many CGI fantasies, and even their small-scale studies are meant to breathe on as large a screen as possible. You can appreciate the way they choreograph action within long-take space better on a big screen. There's a scene in this movie where the kid, Cyril (Thomas Doret), is reunited with his bike and rides it in dangerous proximity to his benefactress's car, after impressing her with some wheelies, as she backs up and pulls out of the courtyard of Cyril's youth home, all in one take. It all looks authentically risky for the boy and the woman driving the car, yet it must have been staged to seem characteristically impulsive for Cyril. While some directors specialize in beautiful framing and the stuff of screen captures, the Dardennes excel in staging action within the frame and focusing our attention on the key details. That's naturalism, I guess -- or neorealism -- and done right it's as much of a feast for the eye as any kind of filmmaking.

This time around the Dardennes have come up with a story that feels especially archetypal; it's likely to evoke many an earlier film depending on who's watching. Cyril's in the youth home because his father was temporarily unable to take care of him. Dad promised to come back for him soon, but Cyril has grown impatient and obsessed. He wants his Dad and he wants his bike. He escapes from the youth home and sneaks into Dad's old apartment building, despite being told that Dad had moved out. Chased by his caretakers, he seeks shelter in a clinic waiting room in the same building, clinging to the legs of a patient, Samantha (Cecile De France), from the same neighborhood. She's surprisingly compassionate. You can hold on, she says, only not so hard. After he's pried off, she takes an interest in the boy and the bike. She's the one who presents it to him, explaining that she bought it from someone to whom Dad had sold it. Cyril won't believe that story; the bike had to have been stolen -- Dad wouldn't sell his boy's bike like that. But he ultimately finds proof that Dad had done just that, and sold off his own motorcycle, too. Suddenly, Cyril latches on to Samantha again, asking if he can stay with her on weekends. She agrees, and helps him track down his Dad, who now has a kitchen-prep job in a restaurant. Keeping the focus on Cyril, the Dardennes don't show us Samantha's first meeting with Dad, saving for Cyril and us together the big, yet inevitable reveal that Dad is some Guy played by Jeremie Renier -- the actor who more nearly embodies the brothers' work than anyone else and serves for them as an icon of feckless, pathetic masculinity. Father and son have an uncomfortable reunion in the restaurant kitchen; Dad seems in a hurry to be rid of the boy. Breaking focus on Cyril, we now see a private chat between Guy and Samantha, in which the father explains that looking after the boy is too stressful for him and asks Samantha to make sure the kid never visits him again. After learning from Cyril that Guy had promised to at least call him next weekend, she takes the boy back to the restaurant and compels Dad to tell him what he told her.

The paternal rejection is temporarily shattering but Cyril seems to recover quickly. He shows interest in playing with other kids for the first time in the picture, but his yearning for a father figure soon reasserts itself as he falls under the influence of the neighborhood drug dealer. Professing to admire Cyril's courage after one of his stoogest tried to steal the bike, the dealer dubs the boy "Pitbull" and invites him to his home (his grandma's, actually) to play Assassin's Creed. He's really looking for a fresh face to do a mugging for him, but Cyril's almost pathological urge to bond with an older man puts him at violent odds with Samantha and in danger of jail or worse when the mugging by baseball bat of a news dealer and his son doesn't go exactly as planned....

Some reviewers have compared Le Gamin with Vittorio De Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, but the similarities between those films seem superficial to me. The film reminded me more of one French movie and one American film. The French film is Robert Bresson's Mouchette, the story of a sullen girl with an unloving father that addresses the possibility of grace for the unwanted and put upon. Cyril strikes me as a sort of male Mouchette, and the ending of Le Gamin strikes me as a counterpoint to the close of the Bresson film, down to the closing burst of classical music. Unexpectedly, the film Le Gamin most reminded me of was Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker. Cyril's world so entirely revolved around his dad that Dad's absence plunged him into a sort of autistic void from which Samantha attempts to rescue him. Cyril's frantic flailing about, climaxing in a salon scuffle during which he stabs Samantha, reminded me of Helen Keller's violent tantrums in Miracle Worker. To be honest, an earlier scene in Samantha's salon in which Cyril compulsively scrubbed his hands in her faucet despite her insistence that he not waste water triggered the comparison for me. The way the film developed, I thought it would be a Miracle Worker without a miracle, but ... to say more would spoil things but see my comparison to Mouchette for those in the know. Compared to Annie Sullivan, Samantha's motives are kept deliberately obscure here, but Cyril clearly fills a profound void in her life. Forced to choose between the boy and a boyfriend after an argument, Samantha chooses Cyril. Even after Cyril stabs her -- it's little more than a nick, really -- she breaks down in tears at the thought of reporting him to the authorities. If she seems saintly, the impression is probably deliberate. The Kid With a Bike is essentially a sentimental story about the potential of persistent goodness, but it's no tearjerker. It seems almost Spielbergian in its vindication of matriarchy and goes beyond Spielberg in suggesting that Cyril is better off without a father figure, given the options in his milieu, but the Dardennes pull this off while appearing to remain clear-eyed and unsentimental. They don't manipulate the emotions in blatant Hollywood ways but theirs is the sort of story an older Hollywood would recognize. That's not a criticism, but it is a warning that the story might seem to belie the brothers' naturalist pretensions. But if you take Le Gamin as a kind of modern fairy tale or parable, albeit redeemed by its relevance, you should be able to appreciate it on its own terms as an outstanding film.

Wendigo Meets DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971)

It's been more than a decade since I last showed my friend Wendigo Harry Kumel's Euro-vampire film, which I'd just bought on VHS in a letterboxed director's cut. Wendigo remembers being disappointed with the film. He'd expected more sex scenes with more overt lesbianism and a greater resemblance between Delphine Seyrig's "Countess Elizabeth Bathory" and the legendary Blood Countess whose name she bears. I'm to blame, in part, because I'd talked it up pretty big based on what I'd read about the film in the fan press. Now, however, Wendigo wanted to appraise it as a vampire film, not a cult sex film. While some of its flaws are still pretty obvious, he finds that he appreciates the movie more on a second viewing.

It was this or the Overlook: Daughters of Darkness's honeymoon hotel.

Kumel's subject is one of the world's worst honeymoons. Stefan (John "Willie Loomis" Karlen) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) are just married and staying uneasily at a hotel in the seafront town of Ostend. It's off-season and the hotel is largely deserted, except for the late-arriving Countess Bathory and her sullen companion Ilona (Andrea Rau). The concierge recognizes the Countess but can't believe his eyes; she's the spitting image of a woman who stayed at the hotel forty years earlier. To Valerie's dismay, Stefan and the Countess share a lurid interest in her namesake, the reputed murderer of hundreds of girls in the name of eternal youth. That's just the latest thing to bug the new wife; it also irks her that Stefan won't take her to meet his mother -- we learn later that he has good reason for his reticence. This early alienation between man and wife makes both appear vulnerable to the Countess, who stokes Valerie's jealousy while ordering a reluctant Ilona to seduce Stefan. Ilona would clearly rather bite the man's neck, but she'd also rather be free of the Countess. Freedom, such as it is, comes when she freaks out in a shower and manages to kill herself with a straight razor. At that point, Bathory makes her play for her real target, Valerie....

Countess Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) has a choice of targets to try her Dracula moves on.

Wendigo deems this a relatively uncharacteristic Euro-horror, until the very end. It had a strong, linear, character-driven storyline for a European film, with little in the way of "dream logic" and music that actually seemed to fit the mood of the story, but it has what seems to him a typical Euro finish: an abrupt act of violence followed by an illogical epilogue with a twist that makes no immediate sense.  For the most part, however, Daughters strikes a healthy balance between style and "substance" (character development, plot). Much of the substance comes from John Karlen's performance as a selfish, dishonest, abusive person who struck Wendigo as more evil, in some ways, than the vampires. Stefan is a bigger, more habitual liar than the Countess, who after all has just one big secret to keep. He quickly proves himself an unfit husband and in a way as much a threat to Valerie as the Countess is. You can see why it wouldn't take much prodding for Valerie to choose Bathory as the lesser of two evils.

Daughters makes no great strides in vampire mythos. The vampires bare no fangs and make no transformations, but they have several traditional vulnerabilities, particularly to sunlight and, as Ilona proves, to running water. Wendigo believes that this is the first time a vampire has been defeated by throwing her under a shower. There's very little blood drinking, and the little we get comes late in the game after a slow build-up of suspense that makes the moment more dramatic. Wendigo notes that Euro vampire movies generally aren't fetishistic about displaying vampire powers. Too often in Anglo-American films you can imagine the writer or director marking off their checklists of abilities displayed and effects deployed. By comparison, the Europeans tend to take supernatural powers for granted without needing to make a big deal out of their use, or they take an eccentric approach to them like this film's play with mirrors. The Countess can use mirrors, and we see her hands reflected, but we never see her face in the glass. You notice that enough to wonder what you might see there if you had the chance.

The glamorous life of the vampire; Ilona gets the dry heaves.

With a strong ensemble cast and patient plot development, Daughters now impresses Wendigo as an above-average vampire film that he can recommend readily, albeit with reservations. He did not find it "slow," as some online reviewers have; maybe he's grown more patient with age. If the film has a grave weakness, however, it's Kumel's direction of action, particularly the three violent death scenes. Ilona's death by straight-razor impalement (?), Stefan's double wrist-cut by the halves of a broken bowl (??), and the Countess's car-ejection (from the back seat) and tree-impalement are all implausibly and ineptly staged. We're not sure why these scenes play so poorly; having seen no other Kumel films, we can't say if he has a chronic weakness or a problem with this particular script. Maybe it's a mark of art that you can't do action well, but we doubt it. But since Daughters of Darkness isn't primarily an action-horror film its lapses, however laughable, can be forgiven. It remains an intriguing and attractive film of disturbing beauty, even if some of its transgressive element has been lost over time. Don't expect too much in the sexual or sapphic line, but do expect a sensuous shiver or two.

Here's a slightly repetitive and spoilerish English-language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by KXKWarriorV.

Wendigo Meets MAMA DRACULA (1980)

My friend Wendigo is a vampire movie fan, but he has a problem with vampire comedies. It's not that he objects to mockery of supernatural creatures, but as he sees it most vampire comedies go for the oldest, most obvious gags, the kind that seem meant to make you groan rather than laugh. You know, "pain in the neck" gags and stuff along those lines instead of genuinely funny characters and situations. One of the most recent attempts, The Vampire's Assistant, is actually one of the more successful in Wendigo's eyes because its unique mythos required the writers to be creative in mining humor from the story instead of using the standard vampire gags. He liked Love at First Bite as a kid but likes it less now. He tends to prefer comedies in which vampires happen to appear but are treated as more-or-less straight menaces, as in The Monster Squad or Vampire in Brooklyn. So when I told him I had an obscure European vampire comedy from a Mill Creek Entertainment box set, he approached Mama Dracula with some trepidation -- and he was right to do so.

Boris Szulzinger's film is a deservedly obscure oddity that illustrates the rapidly shifting fortunes people can suffer in the movie racket. It features not one, but two performers from iconic Seventies films. Louise Fletcher, taking the title role, was just five years removed from her Oscar-winning portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, while Maria Schneider had Last Tango in Paris and Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger on her resume. Were they lured with big bucks after others steered clear, or were they already forced to be less choosy about their work? They would certainly have to be after this project, which could have been an understandable career killer for anyone involved.

Above, Maria Schneider receives an undeserved tribute from the Mama Dracula Dancers. Below, Louise Fletcher tries to think happy thoughts.

Mama Dracula is none other than our old friend Erzsebet Bathory under a more marketable name. She may be Countess Dracula (not that that causes anyone alarm outside of a small Transylvanian suburb) but she lives in Castle Bathory, is named Erzebet, bathes in the blood of virgins and was once bricked inside the walls of her castle centuries ago. As she explains, the place was riddled with secret passages so it was easy to escape. Since then, she's been practicing the same hygenic regimen that has kept her looking like a big-boned American woman in her forties. But times are getting tougher. "In zis decadent modern vurld of ours," she asks in her charming accent, "vere can vun find wirgins?"

In her desperation she turns to modern science, summoning the allegedly eminent Dr. Peter Van Bloed to Transylvania for a "Blood Congress." It's a congress of one, as the egotistical little nebbish (he fantasizes out loud about getting the Nobel) finds himself the sole guest of the Countess and her eccentric twin sons, Vladimar and Ladislaus. While their mother aspires to elegance, and would never dare bare fangs (though she does offer to "bare you my secrets"), her boys -- wherever they came from -- oh, where to begin?

Jimmy Shuman, dressed like a lower-caste Time Lord, flanked by the incredible Wajnberg Brothers.

If you've ever tried to watch the Ritz Brothers in movies from the 1930s and 1940s, you might have an idea of our problem with Marc-Henri and Alexander Wajnberg. While the Marx Brothers and the Howard brothers crafted distinctive individual personalities for themselves, the Ritzes tried to be a sort of zany collective that forced you to laugh by sheer strength of numbers. You had three guys you couldn't really tell apart all yelling, laughing, pulling faces, etc. at the same time. There are only two Wajnbergs, but they're just as bad -- and English isn't their first language. Wendigo gives them credit for trying, but he assumes that they were cast for their goofy looks. They look like funhouse mirror versions of Frank Langella's Dracula and wear the full vampire regalia when they're not working their day jobs at the Vamp dress shop in the nearby big city. They seem to have been given little direction except to be funny, and they may not have understood the direction.

They do get one elaborately -- let's say ponderously constructed gag that depends on the film's odd rules for vampires. The Countess and her boys are daywalkers who are unharmed by garlic or crosses -- though one of the brothers is repelled by a Star of David stitched on the rear of a teenager's panties. They bow to tradition in one respect: they cast no reflection in mirrors. This is all meant to set up a gag the next morning, when they get out of bed and perform their ablutions (including peeing into the sink) at back-to-back toilets designed as mirror images of each other. It looks like the "mirror" scene from Duck Soup, except the brothers are doing it on purpose: it dawns on you that they're acting as mirror images of each other for hygiene's sake. And just as the stupidity of that idea settles in, Dr. Bloed appears, sees one twin facing his own "reflection," sees none of himself, and draws a frightened conclusion. Here we should note that as a comedian, Jimmy Shuman as the doctor makes the Wajnbergs look like Laurel and Hardy. His is a role that requires the actor to either act scared often or keep up a steady barrage of wisecracks. Shuman does neither. He's simply presented to us as an egotistical nebbish who gets worried a few times but finally adopts the persona of a mad scientist. For example:

Our whole future lies in biosynthesis, in generic engineering. Imagine being able to transfer the genetic qualities of human hemoglobin to the e. coli chromosome by the plasmid method, and thus control the regulation of the genetic structure of cells!...But I'm never going to find the necessary genes in rabbit blood!

Dr. Bloed is introduced as if he's going to be the main character of the movie, just as Virginia the virginal but horny barmaid he encounters at a Transylvanian inn seems set up to be the film's romantic interest. Wrong on both counts. This film just keeps throwing new characters on top of the old ones, adopting the Hellzapoppin approach of trying everything in the hope that anything will work. Thus Maria Schneider is introduced as an assistant vampire hunter to a blustering inspector in a deerstalker. He assumes the Countess and her boys are innocent because he sees them in broad daylight. It's this defective detective, in fact, who finally deflowers Virginia, making her fair game for every other lout in the tavern until the whole building explodes. Transylvania, apparently, is where they put the bang in gangbang.

Maria continues the investigation but finds herself sabotaged by a punctured tire. The tire has fang marks in it. The fang marks bleed. It's that kind of movie. And it was at this point, Wendigo says, that it started to change from something insufferably inept to something compellingly bizarre. In his words, it had crossed a Rubicon. It had gotten so bad that it might become good. At the least, it would not be boring, but train wrecks rarely are.

Szulzinger's pile-it-on approach nearly pays off in a climax that brings the entire cast together in the Countess's "cast-tell." Separate mobs of traditional torchbearing villagers and the city men whose fiances have been snatched from the Vamp boutique storm the castle (the city men arriving in a bus bearing a "Fiances Lib" sign. They storm right past a vampire and into ... a fashion show. It's the new line of ball gowns, allegedly inspired by classic movies. After heckling and throwing food at their vampire host (an audience identification moment if ever there was one), the angry crowd settles down to watch their women strut their stuff. This means a parade of ghastly-garbed proto-goths as one of the brothers recites film titles: "Death in Wenice...Ze Birds... Psycho... Some--Like--It--Hot!...Saturday Night Feewer...Apocalypse--Now...Chaws..."

"Ze Birrds!"

And in the middle of this, Dr. Bloed and his questionably-gendered assistant Rosa burst in to announce the success of their great experiment. Until then, the incompetent scientist had only been able to make gold. But once Rosa suggested the formula "E=mc2," artificial blood became a reality with utopian promise for mankind. Let a vampire explain it to a mummy:

You, poor think! There is no need to be scared of dyink anymore. From now on, blood is awailable anytime, anyplace, buckets of it! Anyone who vants to be a wampire can be a wampire ven they would alike, vere they would alike, and vit who they would alike. Humanity can live in the lap of luxury. Eternity is vithin reach!

It's still not exactly funny, but it is almost charmingly insane, a rare moment of mad inspiration saved for last. But it's a hard slog to get there. Wendigo says that if he hadn't been watching it socially he might have given up on it early. So if you dare, watch it with a friend -- and hope he'll be your friend afterward.

Mama Dracula might be enjoyed more thoroughly in a dinner-theater format with the right cuisine, but we have our doubts.

Wendigo sees the film as a complete mess, a mishmash of acting styles, Fletcher's overacting not exactly counterbalanced by Schneider's underacting -- or is it non-acting? He had a hard time wrapping his mind around the odd geography that requires the Draculas to commute through a primitive village to their modern shop in a thoroughly modern city -- a shop that is apparently directly linked to their castle by an underground tunnel. He was demoralized initially by how derivative the film was -- the wirgin-blood concept is stolen from Andy Warhol's Dracula, and the brothers seem influenced by The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Worse, at every moment the Mill Creek copy is a murky mess in its own right. But as the film snowballs downhill it develops a shape and momentum of its own. It eventually got one thing right: it ceased to be a mere vampire-movie parody and achieved its own uniquely idiotic inspiration. It ended up being not quite one of Wendigo's favorite vampire comedies, but one of the damnedest movies he's ever seen. He recommends it to bad-movie buffs only, whether they're vampire fans or not.

LORNA'S SILENCE (2008)

These days people are pretty desperate to live in Belgium. I suppose it depends on where you start life. Lorna, for instance, is an Albanian -- from the country, not the city in New York where I live. Some of us Albanians might want to move to Belgium, too, but Lorna's the one with the system. To be more accurate, she's a cog in the system. Here's how it works. The local mafia makes a deal with a native Belgian, paying him to marry Lorna. They stay married long enough to not look suspicious, then they break up. By then, Lorna has a Belgian passport. Now she can marry some guy from the east and get him Belgian citizenship. Pretty efficient.

The complication, in this particular case, is what to do with the first husband, the Belgian. Lorna has married Claudy Moreau, known to most of her associates as "the junky." And that about sums it up -- except that he's trying to kick the habit. A deep, aching emotional neediness emerges as he embarks upon the ordeal. While Lorna prefers to deal with her husband on a purely transactional basis, he desperately needs her to be near him, to talk to or play cards with. She's the one constant in his life, someone he can set goals around to structure his time and keep his mind off the junk. But she'd rather keep her distance. It's a marriage in name only, of course; Claudy sleeps in the living room on a mattress Lorna keeps stuck between her mattresses during the day. She resents his neediness, especially when it means calling her home from her laundry job on some feeble pretext or another. But despite all the annoyances and her desire to hook up eventually with her Albanian boyfriend Sokol, she can't help pitying Claudy, especially when she realizes that the people who placed her with him specifically matched her with a junky because it'd be easy to make her a widow by arranging an overdose. His resolution to clean up complicates their plans, especially since Lorna's next husband, "the Russian," is on his way to Belgium. They want to be rid of Claudy as soon as possible, but Lorna would rather he didn't die.

So she tries to arrange a divorce to let Claudy can get away clean, even though her handlers claim that a quickie divorce would look suspicious. Her idea is to claim abuse and to get Claudy to hit her. But as she's discovered compassion, he's discovered honor. He doesn't want to go on public record as a violent case. Lorna thinks he owes it to her to clobber her because she stood by him during his withdrawal, but the best he can manage is a tepid slap. She has to bruise herself and bash her head against a wall to make it more convincing. The irony of the situation is that she's trying to save his life, but he feels that she's abandoning him, and that drives him to the brink of falling off the wagon. Lorna realizes suddenly that she can't let that happen. Her solution is to offer herself, naked, to him, abruptly redeeming their parody of a marriage.

This is probably the happiest moment for our main charcters, but things change fast.

This takes us to the halfway point of Le Silence de Lorna, but it becomes hard to describe it further without diluting the shock value of subsequent story twists. But I think I've described enough to get fans of crime cinema interested. This is definitely a crime movie, but of a subset that might be described as lowlife pathos, dealing with the desperate struggles and sorrows of the little people at the bottom of the food chain. It's a mode the Dardenne brothers have worked in before, particularly in the only other film of theirs that I've seen, The Child. They practice a kind of ragamuffin romanticism in naturalistic style and have won awards doing so. Their films (co-written and co-directed) look lived-in rather than art-directed, which is entirely right for their subject matter. In tone they're the opposite of hard-boiled. I call theirs crime films but they're not gangster movies and have nothing to do with fantasies of power or violence. The Dardennes do crime movies, I suppose, because crime is what the people at the bottom are reduced to. But they're an exception to the generic rule because compassion rather than cynicism is their object.

In Lorna's Silence the Dardennes have teamed a genuine Albanian actress of limited experience, Arta Dobroshi, with one of their favorite actors, Jeremie Renier. While their sudden burst of sexual passion is really a little hard to believe, the two performers do have a chemistry that makes the characters' evolving relationship emotionally convincing. In the second half of the film the spotlight is really on Dobroshi, who must leave you guessing whether she's having a moral epiphany or has just gone mad. The movie itself lets you keep on guessing, and Dobroshi gives you good reason to guess either way. The film ends sort of in medias res in a way that leaves you guessing, perhaps for the wrong reasons, but as a whole it's an eye-opening window into a Euro underworld, the humanity of which can't be denied.

Here's the trailer, uploaded to YouTube by moviestride: