LILJA 4 EVER

It was shot just outside Tallinn - I visited a few years back, and it's depiction of those suburbs seems depressibgly accurate (where did you live, Ambrose?).

I saw it at the London Film Festival last November (I think Martin S was there too) and I...like it. You couldn't say I enjoyed it. I'm not surprised it's getting accused of plumbing the depths without offering insights or solutions, but I don't personally find that a fault. It's a surprising choice for Moodysson, who I really like. He took questions after the screening and people were uncomfortable that he didn't seem to take a stance on the subject of prostitution, asking him why he didn't put contact details for relevant charities on the end of the credits. He kind of avoided answering directly, but he was such a mild-mannered guy, anyway. For some reason I expected him to be a really snotty hipster, no idea why.

I saw it last night too and was very, very impressed (thought it would be too one note or depressing). I thought it was very similar to Fucking Amal and Together in displaying unhappy kids, the sucker punch being that here it just gets worse (not without its moments of hope however). He didn't seem sure how to end the film though, we got at least two possible endings which would have been fine on their own but together kind of weakened it. Friend I took was really quite shaken.

The only real problem I had with it was the slightly shakey plotting (naturalistic characters end up acting a bit unnaturally). McDonalds should sue though.

I'm not sure why Moodysson needs to take a stance on prostitution, the film obviously takes a stance on the sex trade though and forces prostitution. I think the contrast between her turning tricks in the nightclub to where she ends up is deliberately clear (one isn't desperate the other is hopeless).

Pete=OTM. It's all about her being forced into a corner and stepping over that line in desperation. This doesn't need qualifying.

i lived in the far east of moscow - it is totaly reminiscient of there too! i dont see the necessity for putting in charity info. etc. cant you tell a story about something without campaigning about it? its non-specificity (is that a word) is its saving grace, and makes it much more effective in whatever message it is trying to send across. having just finished reading a book written by an FT writer about Russias economic transition from communism to capitalism, i felt profoundly depressed, especially when the kids are sniffing glue in the sub. base, and then the boy o.d.s on all the medication. i saw so many of those kids with brown paper bags, in the provinces at any rate, and just seeing them camping out on the streets just made me think 'what the FUCK has happened to russia? What the FUCK has it done to its people?'. the book talked about the changes in cold theoretical economic terms, and argued at the end that there should have been an even harsher price reform, which would have made the collapse of living standards even greater. but confronted by the result of that in this way, i just felt that the west has a great weight on its shoulders, as cheerleaders for the processes that create these conditions, in the short time.

Can't wait for this to come to Chicago. (Should be soon, I think.) Haven't seen Fucking Amal, but I absolutely loved Together.

it is the most depressing film I have ever seen. unlike Moodysson's last film I won't be watching this another four times. Or ever again.

It is like a force of nature, though. I mean, I have had thoughts going through my head about how maybe the plot is a bit formulaic and so on, but the film isn't about plot.

yeah thats what i felt! i just feel so involved...i cant stop thinking about it. i really want to see it again (mainly because i m,issed the end) but i think that it wont be so good

I do think people should be forced at gunpoint to see Lilja 4-Ever. Forced, because no one who knew what they were getting into would see it voluntarily, but is still an excellent film.

Yeah nordicskillz, I was at the London Film Festival showing too. I agree that it is an exceptionally strong film, but I didn't like it. I'm not sure how I feel about important subjects in film, the way that dealing with such things sometimes seems to excuse a filmmaker from putting together a good film, but anyway that's not a problem here. I just didn't enjoy it at all. I loved Fucking Amal, but this just felt too like being pummelled with how miserable some people's lives are.

I think it's a mistake to take this film as "realist" in any way (as if the kids with wings weren't a giveaway). It's a fairy tale -- like one of the old-fashioned Grimm kind, before Disney cleaned up the endings. Girl gets abandoned by mother and cruel step-father figure, then abandoned again by cruel aunt, joins forces with fellow exile (Hansel and Gretel), meets her prince, who turns out to be in the employ of an ogre, who locks her up in a tower and subjects her to horrible torment, etc. It also reminds me of some of de Sade's stuff -- the endless degradation of the innocent and so forth.

So what's the moral? Communism failed, capitalism wins, the "democratic socialists" (i.e. Sweden) sit by and helplessly watch the rape of the former by the latter, able to do nothing more than rush a socialized-medicine ambulance to the scene of the crime after it's too late to do anything. Or give Jimmy Carter peace medals. Or make movies about how horrible it all is.

But it's a very realist film - the angel thing is surely constructed as a fantasy escape on the part of Lilya, and in narrative terms is something to offer some sort of relief from the misery. It looks and feels realist, and from what Moodysson has said, he clearly means it almost as a documentary, of a polemical kind.

I dunno what Moodysson says (are we supposed to care about that? I keep forgetting whether we're still postmodern or not...). But it surely to god is not a realist film. The opening scene is scored by Rammstein, fer chrissake. This is operatic grand guignol stuff. Deliberately over the top. The setting is real enough, sure, and the problem at hand certainly real, but I really think it's a mistake to see it as a movie "about" teen prostitution or anything so narrow. Look at the scene where her mother leaves -- she chases after the car, then slides -- in slow motion! -- into a mud puddle, at which point all the naturalistic sound is replaced by slow, swelling strings, and a DOG comes trotting up (still in slow motion). I mean, this is Orphan Girl Mythology on a grand scale. Like I said, it's a fairy tale.

You can say that it's a fairy tale as often as you like, without making it any less a real description of real problems, that the film is very keen to impress on its viewers. Does the term 'fairy tale' just mean that its realism is tempered by the odd bit of slow motion, or that it has a soundtrack? What sort of insanely tight definition of realism, against an insanely loose use of 'fairy tale', is this? Are realist directors allowed no artistry?

As for appealing to what Moodysson says, yes I realise that is little use, but at least my ideas of what the film is are backed up by what the maker says, unlike your claims of what he is "deliberately" doing. Authorial intent can't override what you see on the screen, but you are implicitly claiming to know his intent too, and your version matches neither the film I saw nor what the maker says.

No, I mean, the problems (post-Soviet socio-economic breakdown, lack of options for young people=sexual exploitation and drug abuse, etc.) are very real. But so are the problems elucidated by the Brothers Grimm. What I mean by "fairy tale" is that Moodysson is adapting age-old European folklore tropes to modern settings, and making the wolves and ogres specific to those settings.

But my bigger point is that the story is not really about the specific problem of teen sexual exploitation; that's material for a TV movie-of-the-week. Lilya is much bigger and broader than that. And Moodysson's approach doesn't fit any existing model of cinematic "realism" or "neo-realism." It's not just the music and the slo-mo, although both of those are fundamentally expressionistic devices; it's also the abundant mythic imagery, and of course all the scenes of children with wings. It's no disrespect to the film to say that it's not a realist movie; I think it's an impressive work, and inventive too. I'd just class it more with something like The Butcher Boy (which I love) -- a fable, essentially -- than with the kitchen-sink school.

Good grief, I don't take 'realist' as a term of praise at all! I prefer non-realist films, indeed anti-realist ones, and certainly fairy tale styles appeal to me far more. I'm not arguing that it's a realistic film because I think calling it a fairy tale denigrates it, I just don't agree with that reading of it at all. But I think we've both made our cases for our views, and it seems pointless to go on much further.

"So what's the moral? Communism failed, capitalism wins, the "democratic socialists" (i.e. Sweden) sit by and helplessly watch the rape of the former by the latter"

cant agree with this at all, as i tried to say in my post. it seemed to me that the subject of the film was Sweden/the west; it is them that are explicitly assisting the rape of the beleaguered ex-communist countries.

re: Rammstein. as soon as this kicked in, it all made perfect sense. the whole soundtrack was may have been operatic/over the top, but i dont think thats for any other reason than a) its defiantly anti-tyasteful, and makes all the more impact, and most importantly, b) this is what kids like lilya listen to 24-7! rammstein, all the savage trance stuff like 'ne obeshai menya', IS the russian music experience. although it mught seem manipulative, i think its primary function is scene setting. liek i said, its a pretty bang on representation of post-soviet life, fairy-tale, realist or otherwise; the story may follow a fairy tale format, and if that precludes it from being realist then fair enough, but its definately 'real'.

Sweden is definitely implicated, no doubt. But I think more for its powerlessness than anything else. I mean, I think the movie differentiates between Sweden and "America," which is far away and never actually seen but is invoked everywhere -- Michael Jordan, Britney Spears, McDonald's. Her mother doesn't abandon her to go to Sweden, she abandons her for America. America, or the idea of America, is the driving force in creating and betraying Lilya's and Volodya's fantasies. Sweden is sort of a numbed passenger going along for the ride -- a comfortable, somewhat removed place proud of its "middle way" between Soviet authoritarianism and American callousness, but actually not much use to anyone else. So in that sense, yeah, I think it's about the failure of modern Europe on many levels.

From The New York Observer:

Moving, Disturbing Lilja 4-Ever Soars to the Heavens

by Andrew Sarris

Lukas Moodysson’s Lilja 4-Ever, from his own screenplay, in Russian and Swedish with English subtitles, has moved me and shaken me as no other new movie has this year. And therein lies a paradox: Though the reviews have been great, the reactions at film festivals enthusiastic, and the film itself chosen by Sweden (reportedly with Ingmar Bergman’s blessing) as its selection for the Oscars’ Foreign-Language Film category, there is something in the advance descriptions of the film that may discourage the casual moviegoer from seeking it out. Any rudimentary synopsis, for example, makes the film sound excessively morbid and depressing. And there’s no getting around it: The enormous amount of pain, suffering and humiliation heaped upon the teenage heroine would never be tolerated by a civilized audience if it were inflicted on an animal.

Yet Mr. Moodysson manages to detoxify the evil that engulfs Lilja (the amazingly affecting Oksana Akinshina) and her younger soulmate, Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), by lifting them to a higher level of being to compensate for the innocence that is so unjustly stolen from them. If this sounds a bit vague and abstract, I must turn to the writer-director’s own comment on his sublimely realized film: "It was supposed to be a film about God’s benevolence, but reality reared its head and it became something else. It turned into a film about two children, Lilja and Volodya, who live in a country that was once part of the mighty Soviet empire and which now lies in ruins.

"It turned into a film about the longing to be somewhere, about leaving everything behind, about being left behind alone, about rich people who think that everything can be bought, about poor people who are forced to sell everything they have (besides their heart), about things that happen far away and about things that happen on the street where I live, about cough syrup and glue, about basketball, about Britney Spears, about carving your name into a bench so that everyone can see that you exist, about being spat at, about giving up, about death, and about a friendship that never ends, about a candle that never burns out. And perhaps it’s a little bit about God’s benevolence as well—despite the fact that He never answers when Lilja prays to him."

The first impression we have of Lilja is of a sassy teenager lording it over her classmates because she imagines she is going to America with her sour-spirited mother and her mother’s current boyfriend. But when her mother tells her that she will be left behind in the apartment with an aunt "temporarily" caring for her, Lilja is devastated, knowing intuitively that she is being abandoned. This is only the first of several betrayals that will eventually make her life hell on earth. When the aunt arrives, the first thing she does is remove Lilja from her comfortable but expensive apartment and proceed to dump her in a one-room flat in a hotel in a poorer neighborhood. Yet, at about this point, Lilja begins to arouse our sympathy and admiration by her spunky resilience in the face of her misfortunes, which include a gang rape by neighborhood youths and a betrayal by her girlfriend, who—fearing her father’s retribution—attributes her own act of prostitution to Lilja, thus ruining her reputation and actually precipitating the gang rape.

Lilja’s only reliable friend is Volodya, but he’s been thrown out of his apartment by his alcoholic father and has sought refuge in an abandoned submarine base built by the Russian empire. The film was actually shot in Estonia, but Mr. Moodysson makes several architectural statements on the bleakness and impersonality of lower-class Russian life. Indeed, the film is rich in tell-tale details befitting these lives of terminal desperation.

Lilja very reluctantly sells her body on one occasion, but she throws up immediately afterward, and tries to find another way out of her difficulties. Just when she has given up hope, a seeming Prince Charming appears on the scene after a suspicious car pick-up, but he behaves like a perfect gentleman and takes Lilja on innocent dates at fairs. If one has seen Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), in which Giulietta Masina’s street-walking Cabiria believes in the true love of an opportunist, one wants to warn Lilja of what will inevitably befall her. Her little friend Volodya warns her against the stranger, but she won’t listen. Lilja’s joyous smile as she crashes around in her carnival car with her respectful "suitor" calls to mind Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), in which Nadine Nortier’s badly treated teenage peasant girl enjoys a similarly brief interlude of glowing pleasure at the carnival. Mr. Moodysson yields nothing to Bresson or Fellini in his brilliant evocation of the bitter irony inherent in his heroine’s illusory respite from her torments. Sure enough, her Prince Charming turns out to be a cynical procurer who persuades her to accompany him to a new life in Sweden with a forged passport. There, she becomes the prisoner of a prostitution ring and is forced to do their bidding. She begins to hallucinate that she is still with her friend Volodya, and he leads her to the only place in which she will suffer no more.

It is at this point that the film soars to the heavens with the simplest and most seemingly naïve means. It may be at this point also that I realized I had never completely outgrown my own earliest religious feelings. Earlier in the film, Lilja attaches great importance to a religious illustration of the Madonna comforting a young girl. I suddenly recalled in my own childhood a large, kitschy, realistic painting in the bedroom my kid brother and I shared. In the painting, a very large angel casts his arms protectively over two children, one clearly older than the other, as they stand dangerously close to a cliff. I seemed to have repressed my memory of this painting, even after my brother died in a sky-diving accident in 1960. When the completely disillusioned Lilja throws away her Madonna picture, I empathized on a deeper level than I have become used to. When she tells one of her enraged clients that he can buy her body but not her soul, I thought of Max Ophüls’ Lola Montés (1955), in which Martine Carol’s Lola is endowed by Peter Ustinov’s ringmaster with the same distinction.

Finally, Mr. Moodysson is to be commended for the respect he shows for Lilja and her story. He never shows her completely topless, and he de-eroticizes the many repetitive sex scenes by restricting them to shots from Lilja’s disenchanted point of view: a variety of ridiculously wheezing males performing a heartlessly mechanical activity.

Still, there is much more to Lilja 4-Ever than the story of one abused teenage heroine. There is also an indictment of the kind of globalization that has led to a frenzied appetite for consumer goods and comforts, while abandoning millions of people to a bitterly deprived existence in which children are the most vulnerable victims. What Lilja 4-Ever has in common with the greatest films is its spiritual transcendence. Don’t miss it.

I was thinking about Martin's comment about being "pummelled with how miserable some people's lives are". Yes, we're faced with a plot where just when you think things can't any worse, they suddenly do, but I never felt that I was being "pummelled". There's too much lightness and economy to Moodysson's style and narration for him to fall into such a trap. Realist/non-realist...whatever. It told the truth to me and that's what matters.

And it used "Forever young" by Alphaville in the soundtrack and I fucking love that song. I've probably blown what little credibility I had by saying that.

Just saw this the other night. Wow. I'm impressed that Moodysson was able to avoid two potential pitfalls in a story like this: 1) heavy-handedness (what Tag said above) and 2) exploitation. (We see Lilya's sexual encounters almost entirely from her POV, which means we don't have the opportunity to sexualize her ourselves -- very smart.)

Here's something I want to talk about: Some of the reviews I've read have called the mother cruel and negligent (in an otherwise insightful essay, Anthony Lane calls her "the real villain"). But the friend who I saw the film with became convinced that the mother was trafficked, too. Not only does the aunt hint at this ("Go spread your legs, just like your mother"), but there are some very clear parallels between the two abandonment scenes (Lilya's mom leaves Lilya; Lilya leaves Volodya), and the two boyfriends (Sergei and Andrei). I'm convinced that she didn't really write the letter disowning Lilya, and that she was subject to similar enslavement in the US.

but if she was trafficked, wouldn't the pervy trafficker have wanted to traffic Lilja too?

I don't really like analysing this film, it's like analysing a boot in the face.

Hadn't thought about it that way, its quite a convincing case actually. (After all, in the same plausible way Lilya accepts a dodgy passport her Mum could be told that she should write a letter for American immigration to say that she was not being used to smuggle a whgole family in).We don't even know if she made it to the states.

The whole social services part of the film is a bit anachronistic. It had to be there but they do nothing.

I'd really like to see this film. The subject--a woman let down by the system forced into degradation--reminds me of the subject of one of my favorite films, and one which I keep citing on this board, Ingeborg Holm (about a widow who falls into poverty and is forced to give up her children and eventually her sanity).

Yes, but hurry! It's only at Landmark Century for a week!

Then I probably won't get to see it. Oh well.