Like the recent 'L.I.E.', it begins near its end, with the protagonist poised on a bridge above an expressway, about to take her own life. Cut to three months earlier, and we see how she came to be there. Betrayed and abandoned by everyone around her - her selfish mother, her deceitful aunt Anna, and her best friend Natasha - Lilja briefly enjoys a supportive relationship of equals with the younger Volodya; but when the suave Andrei comes along, promising a new life in Sweden, Lilja finds that she too is capable of betrayal, leaving Volodya, and the last traces of her innocence, behind.

The two main characters in this film both have a simple enough picture of paradise, which most filmgoers would take for granted, but which proves all too impossible for them to realise: Volodya imagines a heaven where he can play basketball all day (like any American kid), but finds in reality that such dreams can be cruelly punctured; and Lilja quite literally carries with her a picture of an angel holding the hand of a child, hoping to find the sort of unconditional love it depicts, but failing to recognise that she has in fact already found it until it is too late.

Both Oksana Akinshina as Lilja and Artyom Bogucharsky as Volodya convincingly portray the children's desperation for a normal life, as they are wrenched before their time into very adult misery. The camerawork, much of it handheld, creates an atmosphere of documentary realism well-suited to the subject matter, and even the dream sequences have a tawdry, banal quality, suggesting the narrow scope of these characters' horizons, limited as they are by circumstance. And in a scene coming quite late in the film, there is the most bitterly ironic use of product placement (of a McDonald's 'Happy Meal') that you are ever likely to see.

Hard-hitting and relentlessly depressing.

Anton Bitel, 19.04.03