LILJA 4-EVER

Lilja-ever is the most touching movie I have ever seen. I remember how frustrated I was after I had seen it.....

Lilya lives a fairly bleak life with her mother in a run down apartment block, but for all intents and purposes is a normal teenage girl (albeit an impoverished one). Lilya's mother tells her they are emigrating to the USA with her new boyfriend, but at the last minute Lilya is left behind, in the care of her aunt. A forced move into a squalid flat (while the Aunt moves herself into the larger, nicer flat that Lilya and her mother had lived in) is only the beginning, and a succession of miseries are heaped upon Lilya. Lilya's best friend encourages her to join her in prostituting herself for extra cash, though Lilya decides not to prostitute herself. However, when the friend's father finds the money the friend claims that she was the one who sat at the bar while Lilya prostituted herself. Not content with ruining Lilya's reputation at home, the story soon goes round school and results in a gang of boys from her neighborhood viciously raping her. As Lilya has been abandoned, she now really does have to prostitute herself for money to live. One glimmer of hope is her friend Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), abused and rejected by his alcoholic father, with whom she forms a tender protective relationship. Another glimmer of hope is Andrei (Pavel Ponomaryov), who becomes her boyfriend and offers her a job in Sweden. But all is not what it seems, and only bad things await Lilya when she arrives there.

After arriving in Sweden, she is greeted by her future "employer" (in reality, a pimp) and taken to a nearly empty apartment where he imprisons her. Lilya is raped by the pimp and she is then forced to perform sexual acts for her pimp's clients, while he reaps all the financial gain. Moodysson uses a very effective technique to show this abuse; all the abuse is seen from Lilya's point of view (similar to Peep Show). Thus the audience feels as if they are more personally involved in the scenes and, at the same time, explicit sex scenes with a young actress are avoided.

Meanwhile in the former Soviet Union, Volodya had committed suicide, devastated that Lilya had abandoned him. Now Volodya's ghost comes to Lilya to look over her. On Christmas day, he transports Lilya to the roof of the apartment, and, in a moving scene, he gives Lilya the world as a present, but she simply finds it cold and unwelcoming. After one escape attempt Lilya is brutally beaten by her pimp, but she then escapes again with the help of Volodya's ghost. Finally, and much to the distress of Volodya's ghost (who obviously regrets having killed himself) she commits suicide in the continuation of the scene from the beginning of the film by jumping from the bridge.

The film's conclusion shows Lilya and Volodya, now both dead and angelic, happily playing basketball on the roof of some tenement building, safe from all harm the world can do to them.