Lilya 4-Ever

Dir: Lukas Moodysson

2002

*****

Lukas Moodysson's astonishing 2002 film Lilya 4-Ever is depressing, shocking, bleak, disturbing and utterly beautiful. The story follows young Lilya, a school girl living in Estonia with her mother in a rundown apartment block. Her mother meets a man and soon declares that they will all be moving to America together to start a new and better life but soon goes back on her word and abandons Lilya to the care of her aunt who has very little time for her. Her aunt takes the larger apartment she lived in with her mother and Lilya is essentially left to fend for herself. With very little money and a lot of peer pressure, Lilya succumbs to prostitution. She is reluctant at first but when a friend of hers incriminates her to the community, Lilya finds she has very little to lose and not much choice. Her only comfort comes from her friend Volodya, a boy who has also been abandoned and abused. Lilya soon finds life a little more comfortable with the money she makes and is filled with possibility, she meets a young man who suggest they get away and live in Sweden together. However, when she arrives it soon becomes apparent that she had been tricked and is now a prisoner and sex slave. Volodya commits suicide and Lilya's life becomes bleaker than she could possibly had imagined. Suffice to say, you have to be in the right frame of mind before watching this movie but please do. The film suddenly takes a wonderful route when Lilya is visited by Volodya as an angel and the big issues are tackled head on. Moodysson asks some big questions and isn't afraid of challenging taboo subjects. I can't deny that it isn't a difficult film to watch at times but it is such a rewarding film and incredibly important. This is what great cinema is about, it is about voicing oneself, tackling the big subjects and calling things out for what they are. There is just enough left open for interpretation too which I think is very important in a film like this as the audience suddenly has a responsibility to react to such a subject. It has all the social realism of a Ken Loach film with a little bit of the melancholic fantasy of a Lars Von Trier picture, indeed I'm sure both directors were an influence but the mix of angry poetry and harsh reality is all Moodysson's work. The fantasy element aside, it is a story that is impossible to forget and thus, impossible to ignore as Lilya 4-Ever is actually based on the true story of Danguole Rasalaite whose life was tragically similar to that of Lilya's in the film. When someone is clearly full of anger about a subject that is both horrifying and disgusting but can make a truly beautiful story from it, well, that's the definition of a masterpiece.