“A STAGGERING DRAMATIC COUP.” - New Yorker Films

NEW
NEW YORKER FILMS
FROM
“A STAGGERING
DRAMATIC COUP. ”
-Anthony Lane, THE NEW YORKER
“
A LIVE WIRE
stripped of insulation,and the sparks
ENGULF EVERYTHING IN THEIR PATH.”
-Elvis Mitchell, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“MAGNETIC,
VULNERABLE,
FIERCE AND
PLAYFUL
...a phenomenal
debut by Oksana
Akinshina, who
won the Swedish
equivalent of the
Oscar for her work.”
-Aaron Gell, W
“A HAUNTING,
INCANDESCENT,
WORK OF ART
...scenes with a
compassion so fierce
it seems to light his
characters from within.”
-Owen Gleiberman,
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“GREAT. ”
-Stephen Holden,
THE NEW YORK TIMES
AFILM BY
LUKASMOODYSSON
LILYA4 -EVER
A 15-year-old girl in the rubble of the former Soviet Union sinks from poverty to prostitution in a tragic
journey that also approaches a kind of divine love. Both shattering and mysteriously elating, this critically
acclaimed film from the director of Tillsammans (Together) has been compared to the work of Mizoguchi.
SWEDEN • 2002 • 109 mins • Color • In Russian and Swedish with English subtitles

FILM REVIEW
April 18, 2003
Hopes Disintegrate Into a Life of Degradation
STEPHEN HOLDEN
In many ways the 16-year-old title character of Lukas Moodysson's
great, heartbreaking “Lilya 4-Ever” could be any throwaway
teenager living anywhere in the world. But growing up in a grim
unidentified town somewhere in the former Soviet Union (much of the
movie was filmed in Estonia) makes Lilya’s plight infinitely sadder than
if she were an overprivileged brat mopily foraging in a land of plenty.
Roaming through an impoverished town whose decrepit public
housing resembles stacked-up rows of army barracks crumbling under
a slate sky, the local youth have nothing to do but scrounge around for
whatever drugs and booze they can come up with, although sniffing
glue seems the most popular escape into oblivion.
The movie, written and directed by the Swedish filmmaker who
created a deeply humane, even-handed portrait of a 1970’s commune in
“Together,” follows Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) on a descent into a hell
whose inevitability only makes it feel all the more tragic.
Lilya’s future, like that of thousands of other girls drifting through the
wreckage of the former Soviet Union, looks so bleak that she will
pursue almost any path that holds out the promise of a better life
somewhere else. And like thousands of those girls, this vulnerable,
credulous teenager, who prays earnestly to a cheap painting of an angel
cradling a child and boasts of having the same birthday as Britney
Spears, is tricked into bartering away her one readily marketable asset,
her nubile body.
Lilya’s story is a variation on countless true stories that have come
out of Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism about the luring of
desperate underage girls with false promises of jobs in other countries,
where they find themselves enslaved and forced to turn tricks without
pay. Promised a real job in Sweden by a decoy posing as a boyfriend,
Lilya is handed a fake passport and plane ticket and sent abroad. Her
prospective employer, who immediately confiscates her documents, is
really a pimp in a ruthlessly well-organized international operation in
human traffic.
The most remarkable achievement of the film is its presentation of
Lilya’s story as both an archetypal case study and a personal drama
whose spunky central character you come to care about so deeply that
you want to cry out a warning at each step toward her ruination.
When first seen, Lilya is living in comfortable squalor with a tough,
embittered mother (Ljubov Agapova), who barely tolerates her. Hardly
a model child, Lilya is spirited, with a streak of defiance. Her hopes
vault to the skies when her mother announces she is moving with her
boyfriend to the United States, which the girl sees as the promised land.
Those hopes are dashed when the mother decides her daughter
should stay behind until she is sent for. Their parting, in which Lilya
chases after her mother’s car for a final desperate embrace, then lands
in a mud puddle, augurs all that is to come.
The next day Lilya’s aunt Anna (Lilia Shinkareva), a hard-bitten
crone, arrives to take care of her and immediately commandeers the
apartment and forces her niece to move to a rundown hellhole, where
she is left to fend for herself. When word comes from America that
Lilya’s mother is renouncing all responsibility for her, she resorts to
selling her body at the local disco.
Through it all, she clings to her only friend, Volodya (Artiom
Bogucharskij), a younger boy tossed out of the house by his brute of a
father. And the scenes of these two children huddling against the cold
in an abandoned submarine base are as forlorn as anything imagined by
the Italian neo-realist cinema.
With her initial earnings, Lilya buys Volodya (who dreams of being
Michael Jordan) a basketball for his birthday. It’s the only nice present
the boy has ever received, and his resentful father punctures it in a rage.
One ugly message the film keeps hammering home is that poverty and
hopelessness have stripped the adults of their humanity along with their
hope, and their children must make their way in a Dickensian nightmare
of indifference and abuse.
In her final twitch of hope, Lilya naïvely places her trust in Andrei
(Pavel Ponomarev), a debonair young Swede she meets in the disco,
who drives a red sports car, buys her ice cream and courts her without
demanding sex. Once she has given him her heart, he invites her to
move to Sweden with him and makes the arrangements, promising he
will join her in a few days. And in a scene even more agonizing than her
mother’s leave-taking, Lilya bids goodbye to Volodya, who is left
desolate, clutching a bottle of sleeping pills.
Arriving in Sweden, Lilya is asked to hand over her passport to the
stranger who meets her and drives her to a dreary industrial suburb,
where she finds herself locked in a high-rise apartment. The next day,
her new boss drags her to the first of countless assignations that the
movie evokes in a devastating montage of her clients' contorted faces as
they grunt and groan over her inert body and release themselves.
For all its explictness (including two rape scenes), “Lilya 4-Ever”
never feels exploitative. Although it flirts with sentimentality in its
recurrent images of angels (as Lilya retreats into a world of fantasy,
Volodya reappears with angel’s wings), the movie avoids straying into
bathos. These images evoke the innocence of a soul whose body may
be endlessly violated but who underneath it all remains essentially a
child.
LILYA 4-EVER
Written and directed by Lukas Moodysson; in Russian and Swedish, with
English subtitles; director of photography, Ulf Brantas; edited by Michal
Leszczylowski; music by Nathan Larson; art director, Josefin Asberg;
produced by Lars Jonsson. Running time: 109 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Oksana Akinshina (Lilya), Ljubov Agapova (Lilya's mother), Artiom
Bogucharskij (Volodya), Elina Beninson (Natasha), Lilia Shinkareva (Aunt
Anna), Pavel Ponomarev (Andrei) and Tomas Neumann (Witek).
Available in 35mm and VHS public performance to universities, museums & other non-theatrical customers (all dates subject to theatrical approval)
CALL NEW YORKER FILMS TOLL FREE: 1-877-247-6200
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