The Silence of Lorna - pretentious

A lot of people are turned off arthouse cinema. I generally like to be a bit more open-minded, and when I heard about 'The Silence of Lorna' I thought there was going to be a real chance of seeing a great film. The synopsis is simple, but has plenty of potential. The main character - Lorna - is an Eastern European immigrant into Belgium who is trying to obtain Belgian citizenship through a sham marriage to a Belgian loner. She is approached by an underground friend of hers, would she like to earn some extra money by doing the same for a Russian businessman once she has her citizenship confirmed? An interesting premise yes?

Sadly 'The Silence of Lorna' demonstrates why so many people are so fearful of what they perceive to be incomprehensible and pretentious world cinema. The interesting premise is essentially squandered by senseless cuts and holes in the plot, which are probably extremely 'artistic' to people who care - but don't really help with telling a story. One utterly incomprehensible cut shows Lorna chatting to her boyfriend, then in the very next scene she is calmly identifying his body at the morgue. Maybe that's meant to represent the suddenness of death, but it just confused the hell out of me. I even had to check out the message boards on IMDB to find out if I'd missed something or if my DVD was kaput, but it turned out that the director is simply pretentious.

'The Silence of Lorna' embodies many of the things about art house cinema that make it inaccessible to some people and put many others off entirely. I was not impressed, but then I'm probably 'wrong'.