The moviegoing landscape is filled to the brim with forgettable product. Much of what Hollywood puts out is like a mist- it's refreshing in the moment, but once you walk out into the sunshine it promptly evaporates. On the other hand, since I watched Lukas Moodysson's LILJA 4-EVER the other day, the film has lingered in my mind despite my working several shifts and even sitting through another film (the eminently forgettable MONDOVINO, if you must know). That I haven't been able to set aside the film is some kind of achievement, I suppose, but it would mean more if I actually liked what I saw.

In Moodysson's defense, the story of LILJA 4-EVER is one that pretty much demands to be told. In the film, we witness the title character, a teenager living in Estonia, as she is abandoned by her mother, ignored by the rest of her family, insulted by nearly everyone in her life, and eventually seduced into life as a prostitute in Sweden. This is a story that occurs much more frequently than most people would care to admit, and indeed Lilja seems an ideal candidate for sexual servitude- pretty, poor, and naïve. As Lilja, Oksana Akinshina gives a startling performance, navigating a wide spectrum of emotions during the course of the film as Lilja vascillates from the sunny-faced false hope of the early scenes to the junior-league seductress we see during the middle portion, and finally to her despair as she is betrayed yet again by a man she was foolish enough to trust.

Yet there really isn't much here aside from the story and the performance. Lilja as a character isn't especially interesting mainly because it becomes clear early on that she basically exists to have all her hope and idealism pounded out of her by the plot. After a brief introduction in which we see her running, lost and terrified, through a Swedish urban landscape, before standing atop an overpass contemplating suicide, the film flashes back three months to her life in Estonia, where she is excited by the news that her mother's boyfriend will move the family to the U.S. Once her mother announces that Lilja will be left behind alone, it's little more than hard times and hard knocks for Lilja from there on out.

Nearly every other character we meet will treat Lilja terribly. Her aunt will move her into a smaller apartment; her teacher will insult her in front of the class; her best friend will sell herself to guys in a club then blame Lilja to avoid getting in trouble; her neighbors will spit on her and insult her due to her friend's lie. The only person in Lilja's life who treats her with kindness is Volodya, a prepubescent boy who hangs out and sniffs glue at her place whenever his father kicks him out of his place. And so when a slick Swedish guy in a shiny red car meets Lilja in a club and treats her with kindness, she is quick to trust him when he talks about taking her to Sweden and getting her a job there, when she ought to be listening to Volodya, who forsees only trouble.

The film's most intriguing passages (not least because they’re the closest the director comes to making a substantial point) come after she arrives in Sweden. She is met at the airport by the "business partner" of the man in the red car, who asks for her passport, drives her to an apartment building, and puts her in a room that locks from the outside. In the evenings, she is to work as a prostitute, driven to the homes or hotel rooms of a seemingly endless array of men. In one memorable sequence we see a montage of these men as the camera adopts her point of view- sweaty, flabby, distorted faces engaging in sex with a girl who is, for them, little more than a pair of legs to wrap around them (at one point we literally see Lilja's leg enter a shot). The men don't care about her, and they certainly don't want to know her story, as evidenced by one customer who acts out a scene in which she's supposed to role-play his daughter and then yells at her for not keeping quiet.

Meanwhile, Lilja's departure has left Volodya with no friends whatsoever, so he finds some bottles of pills in Lilja's apartment and commits suicide. The scenes that arise from this plot development were when the film really lost me, because after Volodya dies, he continues to turn up in Lilja's fantasies as an angel, wearing tiny wings, dribbling a basketball Lilja gave him as a present, and offering advice on life. Aside from the fact that Lilja would have no way of knowing that Volodya was dead, I found these scenes risible because they were so manipulative, as Moodysson thrusts his theme- life is precious, children's lives most of all, and we should protect their innocence- in our faces. Particularly notable for its misguided-ness is a scene where Lilja and Volodya sit on a rooftop in Sweden while Volodya tells her about how wonderful life is, and that we must endure all the hardship it may bring since death is forever but life is short, etc. And the less said about the film's final shots, the better.

It's not that I minded all the despair in the film, but rather that Moodysson doesn't really seem to have much to say aside from, "pity poor Lilja, and all the other girls in her situation, and be glad you aren’t one of them." He doesn't really bring any kind of personal angle to the film and, after the warts-and-all humanism of TOGETHER and SHOW ME LOVE, his previous two films, that's highly disappointing. Compare LILJA 4-EVER to a film like DANCER IN THE DARK, another film with a downtrodden protagonist who meets a terrible end, and Moodysson's film pales by comparison.

DANCER has its flaws, but it's very much a film by its director, Lars Von Trier, and even as he manipulates the story and stacks the deck against his heroine, he keeps the audience aware that he knows exactly what he's doing. DANCER is essentially a puppet show in which we are able to see the strings, and while this does little to dull the film's impact, it also clues us into the director's stake in the film. Von Trier, admittedly, is a sadist, and in DANCER he's up-front about that fact, but Moodysson adopts the guise of a caring and sympathetic humanist even in scenes like she one where Lilja slips in the mud while chasing her mother's departing car while melodramatic strings swell on the soundtrack and the image slips into slow motion. The whole endeavor seems fairly dishonest to me.

Let me make it clear that LILJA 4-EVER is not a terrible film. If nothing else, Oksana Akinshina is certainly quite a find, and some enterprising filmmaker could very well allow her to capitalize on her turn here (her one scene in THE BOURNE SUPREMACY was a highlight of that film). And as I said before, Lilja's story and those of thousands if not millions of young girls like her practically cry out to be told on film. But Moodysson sells his protagonist short here, portraying her in the simplest of terms as a victim, a martyr, and a cautionary tale, rather than a three-dimensional person, which the real-life girls in her situation almost certainly must be.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD