If Lukas Moodysson's previous film, 'Together', showed how
communal living can offer a shelter from the world's disharmonies, then
his new film 'Lilja 4-ever' portrays the very opposite: how the absence
of community values leads to desolation and despair. Set 'somewhere in what
was once the Soviet Union', in a bleak town with no future, the film follows
the break-up of sixteen year old Lilja's family life, and her inevitable
drift towards penury, prostitution and suicide.
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
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