Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) gets in over her head with a local tough in Lorna's Silence.

What does it take to get ahead in the world?

A new passport and a heart of stainless steel. That's the grim truth of Lorna's Silence (La Silence de Lorna), a social realist entry from the Dardenne Brothers about an Albanian woman trying to build a new life in Belgium.

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) lives with Claudy (Jeremie Renier), a man she paid to marry so that she could get Belgian citizenship. Claudy is a drug addict and a general sad case; he is needy and pathetic, and Lorna will be happy to divorce him and move on when the time is right. She has other plans, which include opening a snack bar with her boyfriend.

Lorna and Claudy's marriage of convenience was brokered by a local tough named Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), and he too has plans.

For one thing, Lorna is now a Belgian citizen, so Fabio has organized her next move, which is to get her to marry a Russian and earn even more money for everybody. The Russian is also after Belgian citizenship, and he'll pay plenty to marry someone like Lorna.

So Lorna has to hurry up and divorce poor, heroin-addicted Claudy. When he decides to stop using, Lorna even helps him with his recovery. But for business reasons, Fabio prefers that Lorna become a widow, not a divorcee.

Can Lorna's kindness prevail in the company of criminals?

Lorna's Silence is a movie about people on the down edge of society, particularly those familiar with poverty and desperation. The minutiae of Lorna's everyday life is presented -- her job, her attempts to swing a bank loan, her investigation of various properties that might work for a snack bar -- but the details of her hard-working routine play out against a desperado immigration scenario.

From the beginning, Lorna appears to have got in over her head; watching Lorna's Silence unfold is a sort of an exercise in anguish. The film is spare, but intense.

Lorna's Silence is in French and Russian with English subtitles. The movie won best screenplay at Cannes last year (and was nominated for the Golden Palm), and also won a Lumiere Award this year for best French language film.

In Toronto, Lorna's Silence is playing at The Royal, as is Sheltered Life, a Canadian film from director Carl Laudan. Sheletered Life, which is showing only Friday and Saturday nights, concerns the life-altering decision that puts an affluent woman and her daughter in a women's shelter.
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