Lilja 4-ever

The movie is extremely sad & hard to watch, cause of its unbelievably realistic picture of poverty, humiliation & depression in which the vast majority of people in the former USSR republics live, including here in Russia. The minority of those who have still managed to keep being human beings in this mess is surrounded & slowly devastated by demoralised animals, created by the decades of communist reign. The realism of the picture is overwhelming & scary. It is so unexpected that a Swedish director have managed to see all the sadness, corruption, violence & immorality of post-USSR space much more clearly than any Russian director ever will. Probably, it is because most people here in Russia see the hell which is going on around them as a normal thing. That's why we need movies such as this - to face the truth, we are so trying to escape in everyday life. Plus, the film exposes the problem of human traffic in such true-to-life manner, it is painful. Worth watching for former USSR citizens, in order to wake-up & realize how degenerate they're becoming. Worth watching for foreigners in order to understand how the 99% of people in Russia & other post-soviet countries live, outside the glamorous & fake facades of Moscow city.

Will Lukas Moodyson be the Andy Warhol of cinematography? It seems like he's on its way to achieve it as film after film Moodyson seems to find a subject that is shocking but stays a part of the society we cann't deny. "Lilja 4-ever" puts us back in some godforgotten village that used to be the powerful USSR. A place at where nothing really happens and where the youth just has to face violence and drugs (cheap medicine like syrup against coughing). Lilja is left alone by her mother who immigrates to the US and how much she defends, Lilja ends up as a childwhore. The movie is hard (the first seconds of the movie with Rammstein's "Mein herz brennt" already is unforgettable) and Moodyson does nothing special to shock his audience...the facts are just there and you can do with it what you want. A masterpiece.

In the former Soviet Union, 16-year old Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) lives with her mother and new boyfriend, and is excitedly awaiting a relocation to the United States. It turns out her mother doesn't want her there, and takes off with the promise of Lilya following later, leaving Lilya alone in her apartment. Her aunt then throws her out, giving her the run-down flat of a recently deceased old man, and Lilya finds herself without any money, and only the young Volodya (Artyom Bogucharskiy) as a friend. Desperate, she discovers how easy it is to make money from whoring herself out, and then meets the handsome Andrei (Pavel Ponomaryov), who invites her to live with him in Sweden. Despite Volodya's warnings, she decides to take his offer, but it soon becomes apparent that there is more to his Andrei's promises.

Based on a true story of a young girl who was trafficked to Sweden only to find herself imprisoned and forced to have sex for money, director Lukas Moodysson's film is set mostly in a very grim reality. Similar both to the social realism of Ken Loach, and the relentless and uncomfortable degrading of it's lead female character that is so prominent in Lars von Trier's films, Moodysson film is certainly brutal. As Lilya (played with a tragic naivety by Akinshina) is being abused in Sweden, we are treated to a POV montage of the various perverts and abusers, sweating and breathing into the camera. We live through the whole thing through the eyes of Lilya, a character of almost operatic tragedy, who suffers for the sins of others in a country ravaged by poverty, glue-sniffing and boredom.

But Moodysson wisely doesn't keep everything grim. In the final third, as Lilya suffers the most, the film often turns dream-like and fairy- tale. He introduces angels and dream sequences, as Lilya finds herself drifting through existence in an almost coma-like state, with her dreams and fantasies her only relief. These scenes (and there are only a few) are not flashy or whimsical, but are subtle and simplistic, in a similar way that Wim Wenders portrayed his angels in Wings of Desire (1987). It's a powerful tool that makes Lilya's plight all the more profound. The film plays out almost like a cruel fairy-tale, only set very much in the real world. Lilya 4-Ever is a hard film to sit through, but is rich in humanity, even though most of its characters are certainly devoid of it.

www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the best movies never get the attention that they deserve. Take for instance this "Lilja 4-ever". It has never been in any large movie theater and is only shown on festivals or on specialized TV stations that broadcast more non-commercial movies. That's also how I got to see it. I knew about this movie, but had never been able to give it a try, until two days ago when it was finally shown on national television.

Lilja is a 16 year old Estonian girl who will move with her mother and her mother's new boyfriend to the USA. But when it's about time to leave, her mother tells her that she can't come with them right now. She will have to stay for a while, following them to the USA afterward and until then her mother will send her money. But once they are gone, it quickly gets clear that they have abandoned Lilja and don't want to see her ever again. She doesn't really have anyone to take care of her and has only one real friend, the young boy Volodja. Completely out of money, she decides to sell the only thing that she has left, her body. She picks up older men in a disco until one day she meets Andrej, a nice boy of her own age. She falls deeply in love with him and when he tells her that she can come with him to Sweden to find a well-payed job and a beautiful apartment so she can start an entire new life far away of all the misery, she is convinced that for once and for all her luck has changed...

Just after I saw the movie, I went to bed to get some sleep, but the entire movie just kept spooking through my head all the time, keeping me awake for hours. Even now, I'm still thinking about the horrible faith of that poor girl. That has a lot to do with the excellent acting of course. Oksana Akinshina is a complete stranger to me, but her performance was so incredibly good and so believable, that you might easily forget that you are watching a movie instead of a real life documentary. Artyom Bogucharsky as Volodya, Pavel Ponomaryov as Andrej, Liliya Shinkaryova as Lilja's aunt,... None of them is famous or has played in many other movies, but one by one, they play their roles as if they have never done anything else in their entire lives.

"Lilja 4-ever" isn't exactly a movie that will make you happy. I would even say that its story will leave you behind completely devastated, but will also keep you thinking about Lilja for days after you've seen it. That's what happened to me and that's something that I haven't experienced too often yet. If you are strong enough to cope with the hard reality, then you should definitely give this movie a try. In my opinion there is only one appropriate rating for a movie like this one and that is 10/10!!!

Lilja 4-ever is an excellently-crafted film created by and for Swedes to help stimulate public debate and redress the issue of the vulnerability of immigrant children. It's a cruel, enlightening, compelling watch for anyone in the West, but it's most definitely not a movie for escapism, it's not an After School Special, and it's a world away from the endless contemporary assault/insult of bald neocon propaganda on Anglo-American screens.

Unless you're very, very dead inside, Lilja 4-ever will horrify you, move you to tears, and leave you speechless...at least in its immediate aftermath. And if you are dead inside, the implicit subject is inexorable capitalist alienation and trauma, so why not catch a representation of your own inner life on film? Maybe you can work it into a drinking game.

Based on actual, turn-of-the-21st-century suicides of escaped post-Soviet child prostitutes in the suburbs of Sweden, Lilja 4-ever is a well-done drama, featuring terrific acting--especially by Oksana Akinshina and Artyom Bogucharsky. It presents moody and stark cinematography, fine script-writing, and solid direction. Lilja 4-ever is not a documentary, but its subject is relentlessly grim and real: the tragic personal results of the continued, desperate corrosion of Eastern European society and its tacit, rapaciously opportunistic exploitation in the isolated, commuter highway-bound suburbs of the West. For its success in making these links visible and cinematic, Lilja 4-ever is outstanding.

I saw Lilja 4-ever when it was released in Stockholm in 2002. You can't watch this particular movie waiting for some good one-liners to repeat to the guys around the water cooler. You may not be able to identify with Lilja. You don't need to feel like she could be your girlfriend. For this movie to work, and to grasp who Lilja is, you need to be able to feel human compassion, sympathy and empathy, and to recognize and appreciate the drama in our socio-economic connections.