Lilya-4-Ever
DIRECTED BY: Lucas Moodysson

STARRING: Oksana Akinshina .... Lilya
Artyom Bogucharsky .... Volodya
Lyubov Agapova .... Lilya's Mother
Liliya Shinkaryova .... Aunt Anna
Elina Benenson .... Natasha
Pavel Ponomaryov .... Andrei

RUNNING TIME: 1 hour 49 minutes

LANGUAGE: Swedish and Russian
Subtitled in English

Moodysson's previous release, Together, was a lovely gentle drama that still managed to raise a smile even when things got rough; Lilya-4-Ever just keeps getting rougher and rougher and proves uncompromising and unforgettable.

In an astonishing debut, Oksana Akinshina plays the sixteen-year-old Lilya. Lilya manages to exist in a drab suburb and dreams of a better life. It is the thought of luxuries and the lifestyle of idols like Britney Spears and Michael Jordan that keep her going. When her mother runs off with her new man, it forces Lilya to be even more self-reliant. Her desire for the better life makes her an easy target for those who want to exploit her for their own ends. Hope is a cruel and wicked lure.

Moodysson manages, yet again, to draw quite amazing performances from young people. He seems to have the knack of seeing the world through the eyes of children. This can be the most horrid and horrible of visions - witness how Moodysson focuses on the faces of the middle-aged abuser during one scene. This angle removes any voyeuristic perspective, replacing it with something much more chilling.

He also continues to make full use of music. The soundtrack features everything from Vivaldi to German thrash-metal. The austerity is made even more real by the choice of locations. Shot in a decaying, run-down former submarine base, Moodysson depicts the former Soviet Union as the most desperate of places. The capitalism that has replaced communism is still a brutalized society that places little value on human worth.

A memorable and moving experience.

His new film, Lilya 4-ever, again focuses on vulnerable young people. But the setting is now the other end of the Baltic in a rundown, unnamed town in the former Soviet Union, and the unsentimental affection has been replaced by a cold eye and an ostentatious resort to a heightened form of Victorian sentimentality. It's a worthy addition to a cycle of cinematic anthems to doomed youth we've had this past year - Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen, Fernando Meirelles' City of God Peter Mullan's Magdalene Sisters and Michael Winterbottom's In This World.
There's an old joke about the difference between capitalism and communism - under capitalism it's dog eat dog and under communism it's the other way around. This could serve as the epigraph to Lilya 4-ever.

The new Russia in which the eponymous 16-year-old Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) lives is a depressed, rudderless place where a bankrupt communist society has been replaced by the crudest form of capitalism. On her decrepit housing estate there is no sense of community, the culture has collapsed, and such hopes as the people have reside in dreams of being elsewhere.
Lilya identifies with Britney Spears, who shares her birthday but was born four years before her; her friend and admirer, the abused and neglected Volodya (Artiom Bogucharsky), thinks he's Michael Jordan as he incessantly tosses a crumpled tin can into a bedraggled basketball net. A banquet is a Big Mac and a Coke.

The past is represented by a deserted and decaying block of buildings, once an important submarine base where Volodya and Lilya's parents worked and a source of pride and purpose for the city. In a peculiarly poignant scene, a party of teenagers, high from sniffing glue, come across a box of medals belonging to an old soldier and roar with laughter as they use them to 'play war'.
Lilya, who looks a lot like Emily Lloyd did as another spirited rebel in Wish You Were Here, dreams of a new life with her mother and her new stepfather in America. But she's dumped at the last moment and lies crying in the mud as they drive off. Her guardian, a slatternly aunt, moves out of her shack and takes over the family's comparatively comfortable apartment, shoving Lilya into a vile, unsanitary flat, vacant due to the death of its elderly occupant.

From then on things go steadily downhill. The mother writes to the social security people disclaiming any responsibility for her. Her closest girlfriend betrays her, giving her a false reputation for promiscuity. She's gang-banged by local toughs. To buy food, she starts taking money for sex. A good-looking young man picks her up in a disco, romances her, then tricks her into going to Sweden where he'll join her. Arriving in Malmö, Moodysson's hometown, she's met by a Pole who takes her passport, rapes her and becomes her pimp. It's a terrible story, but all too typical of what's happening everywhere today. The film is 'dedicated to the millions of children around the world exploited by the sex trade'.

Mitigating the indifference and cruelty is the friendship between Lilya and Volodya, clinging to each other as a little family. Using money she's got from selling her body, she buys him the only proper present he's ever had, a basketball, which very soon deflates along with their sad hopes. Both carve their names on a battered park bench - she inscribes the words 'Lilya 4-ever' - as if to leave some memorial of their passing by. But both these children and Moodysson are seeking some kind of transcendent comfort.

Lilya's most cherished possession is a framed Victorian oleograph of a tall, female angel gently leading a little boy by the hand. This sentimental icon provokes discussions between the pair about an afterlife, and it leads to the appearance in Lilya's dreams of Volodya as her angel, complete with large white wings. This simple vision is reminiscent of Victorian melodrama and silent movies, though there have always been angels in the movies and a veritable flock of them in the 1990s. And recent polls have revealed that the majority of Americans believe in their existence, a fair number claiming to have actually seen an angel. Nevertheless, there is something a little queasy about the way Moodysson uses angels here and it contrasts rather too sharply with the neorealist style of the rest of the picture.

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