Lilja-4-Ever (7.4/10)

Lukas Moodysson, 2002
Lilja-4-Ever is a tragic and gut wrenching film that leaves the viewer troubled long after the credits finish. The film is an adaptation of an actual incident in 2000 involving a teenager from Lithuania that shocked Swedish society and received extensive media coverage. Lilja (Oksana Akinshina) is a 16-year-old living in a dilapidated Soviet era residential suburb with plans of immigrating to the United States with her mother. When her mother abandons her right before they are about to leave, she is forced to live with her Aunt. Who not concerned about her nieces well being, moves her into a filthy rundown apartment to live alone. Lilja spends her days hanging out and getting high with Volodja, a 13-year-old run away from an abusive home. With no other options and at the recommendation of her aunt, Lilja eventually resorts to prostitution for survival. She takes small comfort in the fact that it lets her buy luxury goods such as fruit juice, potato chips, and a small gift for Volodja. While working one night at the club, she meets Andrej a ‘nice guy’ who is not just interested in sex but who really wants to get to know her. He promises her a better life in Sweden with a good paying job, and gets her a passport and a plane ticket. At the last second, Andrej claims he has to visit his poor sick grandmother and promises to meet Lilja in Sweden. In reality, there is no lucrative cleaning job waiting for her, Andrej has sold her to a pimp in Sweden. Who locks her in a dirty apartment during the day, and sells her for sex at night, but is kind enough to buy her a McDonald’s value meal between clients.



Films like Lilja-4-Ever are difficult to write about because of the severe nature of the subject matter. How can someone recommend a film about child sexual exploitation, where teenagers sniff glue and commit suicide on screen, because they thought the film’s narrative was well done or the sound track was interesting? Ultimately, one must judge the film within its context to determine if the content is justified. They must determine whether the director successfully matched the brutality of the images and story with the seriousness of the subject matter. If it is unbalanced in either direction, the film is an epic failure, especially when handling extremely controversial topics. While it is true, that the director could have had much of the truly disturbing scenes take place take place off camera and retain the potent message of the film. The fact is that humans have become so desensitized to disturbing images that artists need to resort to new depths of depravity to get our attention. Moodysson does this very well, almost too well. The scenes in the film get progressively more brutal to the inevitable conclusion, bringing out so many raw emotions in the audience that range from hate to compassion and are impossible to ignore. Maybe that is why we like films like this, or at least like them enough to warrant their creation, because we find them cathartic. Maybe seeing how fucked up someone else’s life is or can be, makes us feel better about our own relatively minor problems and the social context is just an excuse to evade censorship. Regardless, the way Moodysson creates a universe that is completely tragic and utterly devoid of any hope to bring attention to a real and grave injustice speaks to the power of cinema.