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LILYA 4-EVER Send This Review to a Friend
One of this year's more accomplished films from abroad, "Lilya 4-Ever" is an emotionally wrenching portrait of a 16-year-old girl in Russia who longs for a better life but is trapped in heartbreaking circumstances. Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson keeps his film remarkably restrained in style and his leading actress, Oksana Akinshina performs accordingly. This is a tough but beautifully realized work.
Lilya (Akinshina) hopes to go to the United States with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, but mom dashes Lilya's dreams when she says she's going first and her daughter can follow. It's a ruse. Lilya is passed along to a bitch of an aunt, who takes over the apartment, as lousy as it is, and relegates Lilya to worse quarters. Lilya escapes and starts to prostitute herself at a disco.
A needy boy, Volodya (Artiom Bogucharskij), is befriended by Lilya. The lad has been brutalized by his father, and the victims form a bond of friendship that serves as an emotional anchor in the story of their plight and how they try to cope. Lilya is terribly vulnerable and she sees a ray of hope in a liaison with man who promises to take her to Sweden for a new life with him. We suspect trouble, but she pins her faith in the man, and we watch the next step in Lilya's degradation after her arrival.
I don't much care for some of the lyricism and imagination in which Moodysson indulges at the end, but that's a quibble. Following the lives of Lilya and Volodya is gripping and intensely moving. The bleakness of their struggle for survival is hard to take, but the story is told with so much built-in compassion that the film is in its unusual way warming for how it puts us in touch with its beleaguered characters. A Newmarket Films release.
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