The Dardennes' screenplay succeeds best where it is posing these questions, and the strongest scenes are based on this: some blackly comic scenes where Lorna realizes what she must do in order to obtain a quickie divorce, and one memorably painful scene to watch in a seedy bar where she must slow dance with her proposed Russian husband, set to some ultra-cheesy music. The constant changing hands of wads of Euro notes, a recurring motif, illustrates what is at root ultimately driving everything along. The problem is that in order to create the situations, some rather ill-judged plot contrivances have to be thrown in; despite for the majority of their screentime together Lorna being aloof to Claudy's gestures of friendship, within a few short frames we are made to believe that she harbours a passion for him, whether physical or spiritual. Almost immediately afterwards, a major plot development occurs offscreen, and the film is suddenly turned on its head again.
This appears to be the major gripe that some viewers have had with the film, and in particular with the final minutes which seem counter to the apparent realism of the film up until that point. But this is to make a major misjudgement about what the Dardennes are doing: despite their strict adherence to a realist aesthetic and mise en scene, their film is not primarily about the harsh economic realities of New Europe, a la Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export (2007) or Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever (2002), though this is clearly the context. What the film's second half becomes is the kind of Bressonian cinematic poetry that should be an obvious reference to followers of the Dardennes' prior work. If the rather clumsily handled dramatic elements are the price we have to pay to see the brothers experiment with new forms and expand their range then so be it.
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