Cast: Oksana Okinshina

Director: Lukas Moodysson

Screenplay: Lukas Moodysson

Running time: 1 hr 49 mins

Genre: Foreign/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Films that emerge out of the Swedish turf have their own inherent bleakness in them. This is not without truth as Sweden has the highest suicide rates all over Europe, and let’s not forget that this is the land of Ingmar Bergman, the Father of Swedish miserablism. In Lukas Moodysson’s grim and unrelenting Lilya 4-Ever, one might have to stay far away from sharp objects or vertiginous heights post-viewing, for the depicted portrait of an abused 16-year old girl douses out all hope. Shot in the barren wasteland of Estonia and Sweden, the tragic heroine is abandoned by her mother, forced to live in squalor, thrown into prostitution and cruelly flogged to old men wanting that quick, easy fuck. The ugliness in this film is unbearable, and Moodysson documents with a stripped-bare, unpretentious cinematography that aptly provide the film’s social grit and realism. But it is not without momentary beauty – Lilya befriends a local outsider, the younger Volodya, and this friendship is studied with tenderness, albeit punctuated with the pangs of broken childhood. They sniff glue and run around rooftops in slow-motion. This is escapism in its heartwrenching form.


VERDICT:

For all its flaws, Moodysson transforms a rather proverbial storyline of a teenage prostitute into something with socio-political weight. Lilya 4-Ever is, above all, an indictment to an immoral trade that ruthlessly exploits children’s flesh. It’s also a very dark, depressing movie with a blistering central performance of its lead Oksana Okinshina.



RATING: B+