Lilya 4-Ever

"Lilya 4-Ever" opens with the awesomely guttural growl and punishing guitar swell of Rammstein's "Mein Herz brennt" on the soundtrack. The camera follows a teenage girl, who we rightly presume is the title character, on a desperate, sick run. The girl's mouth bleeds, her stride is exhausted, she looks utterly lost, yet she pushes ahead anyway. A bird circles overhead. Though certainly viewers of European cinema will not be surprised when this beginning turns out to be the end, right now we have no context: there's just a girl, obviously brutalized, trying to keep herself alive by force of will. There's nowhere for us to withdraw to, no one for us to feel outraged at, just the shock, pounded into us by a jerking handheld camera and that oppressive music and the bloodied face of a teenage girl.

The key to "Lilya 4-Ever" is that it never gives us that place to withdraw to or that target for our outrage. Writer-director Lukas Moodysson (who based this film on a true story) has an agenda, it's true, but he hasn't made an agenda movie, with the attendant revelation speeches and careful scale-balancing and rousing final note. He's made a movie about a teenage girl whose protectors abandon her, whose eked-out existence falls apart, who remains a girl, struggling against the desperate fate foretold by the film's opening. There's nothing easy about it. But he takes such care with the story, and has such a skilled lead actress, that as much terror and loathing and sorrow as the story inspires, you can't look away for a second.

Oksana Akinshina, who portrays Lilya, has what we think of as Slavic beauty, with wide cheekbones, a small, pouty mouth, serious dark eyes, and creamy skin. Her character, from "somewhere in the former Soviet Union," is 16 years old; in a departure from the typical American practice of using 25-year-olds to portray teenagers, Akinshina was 15 when this film was made. She looks it, too, which makes what comes next all the more affecting and appalling.

Lilya is abandoned in the film's opening minutes by her mother, who takes off for America with a boyfriend met through a dating service. Her aunt, assigned to look after her, stuffs her into a craphole apartment, takes over the nicer one in which Lilya had lived, and then abandons Lilya as well. Lilya has one friend: a boy a couple years younger than her named Volodya, played by Artyom Bogucharsky. Volodya has an abusive father who regularly throws him out of his home, an unreturned crush on Lilya, and a love for the game of basketball, which he plays by throwing a crushed soda can into a bent hoop on a concrete playground. Lilya and Volodya try to kindle hope in each other for as long as they each can, though Volodya's sickeningly precocious enthusiasm for substance abuse is immediately dispiriting in that regard. They share small moments. But neither has money.

Lilya, however, is pretty, and she has a vapid friend who suggests they go to a club and each turn a trick, since she wants to buy a new dress. When they enter the club, vast, detached, pounding electronica mutes any dialogue: a vivid symbol of the impersonal forces that are about to sweep Lilya up. And even though her friend is the one who sells herself, Lilya ends up labeled the whore. She still doesn't have any money, and she's seen how it's done. And over the next few months she goes down, down, down, farther than you ever want anyone to go.

Both lead actors do a horribly vivid job bringing their characters to life. Akinshina gives Lilya a desperate enthusiasm for even the smallest pleasures imaginable. She doesn't shrink from her fate, but tries to control it, even as it becomes obvious that her attempts to control her fate will get her into worse trouble than surrendering. Bogucharksy's Volodya has an astonishingly bleak outlook on life tempered by, well, the giddy hopes of a child: for love with Lilya, for a warm place to sleep, for total basketball supremacy. It's impossible to watch them struggle without feeling your heart drop in your chest.

Moodysson isn't a sadist, though, and he realizes that there must be some relief. This comes, however, not in an improvement in the characters' circumstances but in a metaphysical gambit that looks silly on its surface. In a way, though, its silliness is damningly appropriate: as much as both we and the characters want an escape, the idea that an escape could be available is as ridiculous as it is necessary. "Lilya 4-Ever" is a painful film, but it earns its pathos honestly; if, in Moodysson's obvious intention, it rouses you to action, it does so not with stirring fanfares and exhortations but with the sober realization that there may be a way to prevent this story from becoming fact again, over and over, forever.

NON-FILM-RELATED THOUGHT I HAD DURING THIS FILM

At one point in the film, Volodya asserts that one day he will be "a million times better than Michael Jordan." Abe Pollin on line 1, Volodya.

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