Lilya 4-Ever

What makes this film watchable, as well as heartbreaking, is the luminous spirit of the title character, played by Oksana Akinshina. Lilya is a teenaged girl, abandoned by her mother in a ravaged post-Soviet landscape when she escapes to America with her thuggish boyfriend. Then Lilya is shunted aside by a wicked aunt who appropriates the mother’s apartment and sends her off to a dismal flat in which an old man has just died. Her downward spiral follows with all the inexorability of a Zola or Dreiser heroine. Betrayed by a friend who drags her to a disco where Russian new capitalists troll for young girls, Lilya’s each painful step into degradation is carefully delineated, mitigated only by the affection between her and a younger boy, cast out by a brutal father, with whom she forms her only remaining bond. When a handsome, gentle man offers to engineer her escape to Sweden, the boy is rightfully suspicious, and devastated when she grasps the one glimmer of hope afforded her. There is some parallel both in radiant beauty (light against dark) and in plight to the girl in Maria Full of Grace, but Lukas Moodyson, despite the gentleness so well expressed in Show Me Love and Together, is much more relentless in his depiction of her helpless descent. Snatched from the plane in Stockholm, Lilya is imprisoned in a featureless high-rise apartment and taken out only to be sold to a sickening succession of men, her only respite in relation to the remembered boy who is now a half-fledged angel, but unfortunately no guardian. Their whimsical reunion in some rooftop heaven is the only palliative to her dismal fate. Though the story of one indelible character, this film suggests a world of pain over the betrayal and exploitation of children. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-82, RT-85.)