Lilya 4-Ever
Lilya 4-Ever
Friday 25 April 2003 02.22 BST
I t is almost beyond belief that Lukas Moodysson should have abandoned so spectacularly the feelgood humanism of his first two features, Show Me Love and Together. Those were Swedish fables of love, family and friendship which bathed us in a warm and fuzzy comforting glow. But he has moved to a new level of inspiration with this dark masterpiece: a vivisectional experiment in horror and despair.
It is an uncompromisingly bleak, devastatingly powerful study of Lilya (Oksana Akinshina), a poverty-stricken teenage girl abandoned in a crumbling Russian town when her mother leaves, apparently for the United States, with a man she has met through a dating agency - and refuses to take her with them. In her wretchedness, Lilya finds a friend in a lonely 11-year-old boy, Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), but then precisely duplicates her mother's betrayal when she meets a smooth-talking young guy who says he can take her away to Sweden.
She gets on the plane with the fake passport he has procured for her, bound for a paradise of freedom and riches, with hardly a thought for Volodya. And it is right here, in our liberal, prosperous western Europe, that the illegal immigrant Lilya meets her unwatchably horrible fate.
Lilya 4-Ever is part of an urgent new wave of movies about immigrants and asylum seekers: films like Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort and Michael Winterbottom's outstanding docu-drama In This World - and there is an echo with Winterbottom's movie when Lilya realises that to a stateless person without rights, "this world" can look more or less the same whatever country you're in.
But in comparison with Moodysson's film, each of these recent features softened the blow and sugared the pill with grace notes of compassion and hope. For humane or aesthetic reasons, they shrank from exploring the very worst that human beings can experience. Lilya 4-Ever, frankly, does not.
Moodysson has said that it is a film about redemption and that a Christian sensibility informs its every scene. These aspects escaped me. What makes the film so compelling is the ferocious ingenuity with which Moodysson ratchets up the fear and astonishment that accompany Lilya's all too believable descent.
When the movie begins, Lilya is running through featureless streets, bruised and bleeding, to the accompaniment of heavy, nihilistic rock music. Running from her fate? Rewinding to the beginning of her own story, we find an averagely moody teenager not doing well at school. "A golden future awaits you," says her teacher, handing back to Lilya a test paper and adding: "I was kidding." The whiff of sulphur is already detectable in the teacher's culpable, casual defeatism.
When's Lilya's mother (Lyubov Agapova) announces that there is no place for her in the New World that she has dreamt about, Lilya finds that the abandonment is compounded by her spiteful Aunt Anna (Liliya Shinkaryova), who boots her out of the relatively spacious flat and shunts her into a tiny, squalid slum. Glints of hope, albeit of the most wretched sort, come with her friendship with young Volodya, kicked out of his own home by an abusive father and nursing a crush on Lilya. He moves in with her, and together they build a kind of family. But as Lilya drifts into prostitution to pay the rent, and starts a relationship with a handsome and protective suitor, Volodya feels the pangs of jealousy and hurt.
All of this would be material enough for many directors. Working from the example of Loach or Truffaut or more recently the Dardennes brothers' movie Rosetta, a 90-minute feature could quite plausibly be made from the story outlined above and nothing more. A poignant tale of human vulnerability and social realism.
But then Moodysson, with a demonic showman's flourish, raises the curtain on the second act in Lilya's life. On arriving in Sweden she finds that the promised job does not exist. It was all a trick and Lilya is imprisoned and forced into prostitution - repeatedly raped, day after day after day, in ways that Moodysson pitilessly shows us from her perspective. And in a flash of delirious despair we can sense what is passing through Lilya's own mind: what has happened to her mother? Was the US she was promised an illusion also? And does Lilya somehow deserve what has happened for deserting Volodya? It is the biggest delusion, the strangest fear, and the worst horror of all.
This is certainly an extravagantly cruel movie: really cruel in a way that I have hardly experienced in any other film - but compelling as well. Forced prostitution is a horrible reality linking the pauperised post-Soviet states and the sex industry in the moneyed west. (Here I must raise a caveat. The Russian critic Alexander Kan tells me that the Russian dialogue sometimes sounds stilted, possibly from being unsatisfactorily translated from Swedish. I admit I can't judge this.)
The recent films released here about the illegals have been clearly shaped by liberal, decent concern. Moodysson's seems to me to be fiercer and more ambiguous than this. Lilya appears finally to be locked into an eternity of horror, a state of affairs not obviously ameliorated when Volodya's spirit appears to Lilya in a dream, trying to explain the significance of a piece of graffiti she once chiselled into a municipal bench: "Lilya 4-ever". There was something powerfully hopeful in her reaching for the idea of "4-ever", Volodya suggests, but before he can explain, Lilya is brutally shaken awake for another working day in hell. There is something elusive, almost whimsical in Volodya's appearance, sporting angels' wings - but something inspired as well.
When Moodysson released his debut feature film, Show Me Love, he received a sensational endorsement from Ingmar Bergman who said it was a "young master's first masterpiece". As far as I can see, this terrible, forthright excursion into the heart of darkness represents a grown master's mature masterpiece.
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