You, the Living

You, the Living is the big mama of A Serious Man. While A Serious Man opens with a zoom in, it ends with a massive zoom out. Like Roy Andersson's last masterpiece Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living is a collection fifty absurdist, loosely connected long shots of Swedish life. What emerges is, to use a cliche, bigger than sum of its parts - a sincerely-sad, bleakly-funny and enlightening human concoction. Something here to be said about how bleakness of vision not translated into screen dullness like last year's Synecdoche, New York which totally failed to do so. This year both You, the Living and A Serious Man showed us how vital emotions like sorrow and humor are connected with a dotted line.

The Silence of Lorna

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, is a part of a immigration scam - a sham marriage with a Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier) with a plot to get rid of him to marry a Russian mafia-boss to get him Belgium citizenship and her lots of money so that she can marry her boyfriend and start her own business (a snack bar). The plan goes almost alright but our heroine gets all weak and human. Here the director duo follows the cracks of humanity in an otherwise perfect scheme, which as the title suggests, opens as Lorna's moral and human silence breaks away slowly. More suited for my taste, Lorna's silence is more static than handheld (unlike Dardenne Brother other films), helping us to understand our heroine's psyche and her slow inner change, and her final (almost dreamlike) act of revolt and redemption. There is something painfully true yet consoling in the Lorna's journey of humanity and liberation showing a slight hint of madness.