Ray Pride

We've failed the future.

Me, you, society, every nation on earth: that's what Lukas Moodysson's harrowing, beautiful tragedy "Lilya 4-Ever" says, with stark empathy and no small embrace of Dickensian melodrama. Moodysson dares to point that out, with love and rage, and the attentive, lyrical gift of the reformed poet that he is. Following the 34-year-old writer-director's brilliant "Show Me Love," one of the best films about puppy love, and "Together," a tender Renoiresque satire of Swedish communal life in the 1970s, it's an earnest drama that means to change the world.

Lilya is 16. A face filled with sunshine. She lives in a nameless suburb of a faceless satellite of the former Soviet Union. Her mother and her lover are leaving for America. They promise to take her. But they leave her behind, with promises she'll be sent for. No letters. No money. Lilya's aunt throws her out of the family flat, into a decrepit apartment an old man's just died in. Her only friend is an unkempt 11-year-old, Volodya, despised by his father as a "runt," kicked around, left in the cold. They play at children's games. "A golden future awaits you," a teacher tells Lilya, handing her a test. She's done badly, she's confused, her face shows. "I was kidding," the casually cruel instructor says. Meanwhile, her best female friend turns tricks at a nearby disco that she and Lilya dress up for. The friend's father finds her fistful of bills. She tells him the money is Lilya's. Everyone in the housing estate presumes she's a "slut." She meets Andrei. A handsome young man, kind, with promises of a new life in Sweden. She's flown to Malmo (Moodysson's hometown), dreaming of the West. Within moments of leaving the airport, she knows: she's been sold. Her dreams cannot hold against malign mediocrities, the median atrocity of men who want young flesh.

"Lilya 4-Ever" is beautiful and sorrowful and tragic, as inhabited as pages of Zola. Forget the chemical despoliation of Soviet-occupied regions like Latvia and Estonia. Forget the euphemism "collateral damage." As Lilya, Oksana Akinshina is girlish innocence, with brown-eyed angel radiance, a downturned, full-lipped mouth, a bump in her upturned nose. It's the kind of child's charm easily taken as beauty. But her luminous performance is many, many meters beyond an Amanda Bynes, a Hilary Duff, an Olsen twin from the wrong side of the tracks. Her exquisite, fresh, freckle-faced radiance makes her an anti-Britney, yet Lilya is thrilled when she hears that she shares a birthday with Miss Spears.

Unrelenting but hardly didactic, working with a dreamy particularity, Moodysson's shrewd and skillful construction makes it simple: murder one child, you murder the world. Kill a dream? Forget the future.

A moment. When she realizes her mother is driving away without her, she runs from the apartment where she's been the sullen teen, into the cold and damp. As the car wheels away, she cries out, "Mama!" Your heart stops, your breath stops. Moodysson cuts to an image in slowed motion as the bare-kneed girl slides in the tarry mud, she's splattered, befouled. A dog enters the frame, licks its uncompromising love onto her ear. I've seen "Lilya" three times and every time, that scene's a killer. There are predecessors to this simple story, notably two films by Robert Bresson. "Mouchette" is another movie that asks, "Why would a child want to die?" and Moodysson nods toward that film with an amusement-park-bumper-car ride in "Lilya." More to point may be "Au hasard, Balthasar," the story of a punished donkey who stumbles dumbly toward an escape from a cruel world in that film's final frames.

Working in Russian, a language he doesn't speak, Moodysson remains a daring, pitying filmmaker. The cinematography is luminous, and he continues to work with a fluency of economical editing and fluent handheld camerawork that cuts to an instant's flutter of emotion. He's willing to be as stark a dramatist as James Cameron in "Titanic," yet in all three of his features, the father of two has demonstrated an uncommon identification with teenagers. This glowing portrait of guilelessness and naiveté turned callow is not a wallow; Moodysson shares none of Harmony Korine's esteeming of picturesque squalor. You see the hope on faces. The fear.

He's also attuned to the power of music in dreams of escape. "Lilya" opens with a roar, a song by the German heavy metal band Rämmstein, the lyrics of which translate as "my heart burns." Throughout, the narcotic strains of techno suggest a kind of unimaginable paradise on the other side of... what? The border? This life? The first time I saw the movie, at the Vancouver International Film Festival, it ended with this credit: "This film is dedicated to the millions of children around the world exploited by the sex trade." It wasn't on the U.S. print I saw last week. Yet it's typical of Moodysson's project. He says he made it to make audiences angry. To realize, in metaphorical terms, how cold the world can be. It's like an outcry of adolescent anger, with the energy and purity of angry pop. When you're young, "Why can't the world be perfect?" is a perfectly good question. How fucked up is the world? "Lilya 4-Ever" is but a furious glimpse.

"Lilya 4-Ever" opens Friday at the Landmark Century.

(2003-05-07)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
A rare retrospective of the painstaking documentarian's work brings together nine of his features, which are among the more astringent nonfiction films made in the last thirty or so years.
(2003-04-30)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2003-04-30)

X appeal
Trumping the multi-character concoction of "The Usual Suspects," in "X2" (also known as "X2: X-Men United"), is a lineup of fourteen principal super-powered characters and a mix of tones that ranges from delicate comedy to sly sociopolitical commentary
(2003-04-30)

Terror's isms
In his intently cinematic debut as a director in "The Dancer Upstairs," based on Nicholas Shakespeare's adaptation of his own sturdy novel, the legendary-to-some Steppenwolf actor does few of the things you'd expect from an actor-turned-director and most of the things you'd want from this complicated character.
(2003-04-30)

Tip of the Week
(2003-04-22)

Short Runs
(2003-04-22)

For Peet's sake
(2003-04-22)

The day the clown cried
(2003-04-22)

Tip of the Week
(2003-04-15)

Short Runs
(2003-04-15)

This American guff
(2003-04-15)

Growing up
(2003-04-15)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment