Crime Drama ‘Lilya 4-Ever’ Is a Bleak Bildungsroman

Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson gained an international audience by making two honest and ultimately uplifting movies about adolescence. Show Me Love (1998) and Together (2000) entered the sometimes painful world of young female protagonists, showing their subtle transformations from awkward outsiders to outsiders with a renewed sense of community and self-acceptance.

Lilya 4-Ever (2002), Moodysson’s newest film, is also a story of a teenage girl’s coming of age, but that is where the similarities to his other films end. Lilya 4-Ever is a bleak bildungsroman with a political message about the disparity between “new” and “old” Europe, seen from the perspective of a vulnerable girl forced into prostitution. There is no uplift here, just her brutal reality.

Watching Lilya (Oksana Akinshina), an average teen as Lilya 4-Ever begins, become a despairing, mistrustful, and under-aged prostitute is both compelling and unsettling. Everyone who proclaims to care about her abandons or uses her, including her mother and best friend. Still, the film avoids veering into melodrama. It even seems familiar by combining typical teen movie themes (alienation, embarrassment) with social realities, including a booming trade in illegal immigrants forced into sex work.

Lilya first appears beaten and out of breath, running through a gray housing estate that could be any Northern European suburb to the pounding sounds of the German metal band Rammstein. As she peers over the edge of a freeway overpass, Lilya 4-Ever cuts to months earlier. This entire film-as-flashback is a common trick (see also James Foley’s 2003 film, Confidence), but here it prepares viewers for Lilya’s drastic transformation.

Three months earlier, Lilya is a regular, if rebellious, teen living in a small town in an unnamed, formerly Soviet state. She lives in a dingy housing estate with her mother, smokes Marlboros when she has the money (“Wall Street” brand when she does not), hangs out with friends, and dreams of America. She shares a birthday with Britney Spears, whom she idolizes. The creeping monoculture of US capitalism is evidenced by a Mcdonald’s even in this dreary town. America is the only thin tether to hope for Lilya and her friends.

For Lilya, this tether breaks when her mother leaves her to travel to the States alone. She initially tries to go to school and maintain her routine, but ignorant adults stall her attempts to keep her life in order. An evil aunt arrives and kicks Lilya out of her home, moving her to a dump of a place with a “potato hag” for a landlady. As she returns a test, a cruel teacher tells her, “You have a golden future ahead of you. Just kidding.” Lilya begins to resent the adults around her, but she’s unprepared for worse treatment later.

Lilya’s peers, who at least take notice of her plight, are both her salvation and her undoing. When her old friends shun her, Lilya finds comfort in fellow outcast Voloyda (Artiom Bogucharski), a glue-sniffing younger boy with an abusive father. The two create a sort of family, eating dinners of potato chips and vodka in the dark after the electricity is turned off in Lilya’s derelict squat. Their relationship is Lilya 4-Ever‘s emotional center, suggesting, briefly, hope in the form of companionship. But this, too, breaks down.

Lilya is lured to Sweden by an attractive, “Westernized” boyfriend who promises a good job and a plush apartment. Once there, he pimps her, taking her nightly to a McDonalds parking lot to wait for customers. The place that once symbolized for Lilya the West, the promise of prosperity and freedom, is now associated with her sexual slavery.

The Swedish men she sleeps with are as unfeeling as the other adults in her life (for many, it is exactly her youth that turns them on). Moodysson shows these encounters from Lilya’s perspective, a parade of sweaty, grunting men. Lilya’s fascination with Britney Spears takes on sinister overtones when one of her customers forces her to act and dress like a naughty schoolgirl. This scene reveals the consequences of a public culture that sexualizes teenage girls because it reinforces and trivializes the private trauma of acting out this fantasy.

Lilya is not a “hooker with a heart of gold” or any other stereotype of prostitutes in mainstream cinema. She’s trapped in an economy of sex. She is not empowered by her sexuality, merely a victim of it. Her small attempts at rebellion get her into more trouble. When her pimp instructs her to make herself “pretty,” Lilya cuts her hair and makes her face up like a sad clown, exercising the meager power she has over her own body. But her act leads to a beating, not redemption.

Lilya’s isolation deepens during her stay in Sweden. To console herself, she dreams of Volovyda’s kind words and stares out the window of her apartment prison. What she sees is remarkably familiar to the view she had in her former eastern housing estate – a maze of plain brick buildings, a McDonald’s, and uniform streets.

Ironically, Sweden is nothing like her home. This becomes more apparent in a department store, where she is surrounded by what she dreamed the West would be: colorful goods, happy consumers, and a buzzing economy. But, unable to communicate and robbed of her passport and self-esteem, Lilya can only stare silently and futilely attempt to escape. What she doesn’t know (and the viewer does) is that she is surrounded by Sweden’s social welfare net that might, if she could only make herself visible, give her the education and support she needs to escape the life she has fallen into.

All this misery, presented so bluntly and relentlessly, starts to beg the question, “What is the point?” Lilya 4-ever might be monotonous or take on an exploitative edge in less capable hands. But Moodysson’s detail and Akinshina’s subtle performance make it believable and affecting. Lilya 4-Ever blows the lid off the image of a united, integrated Europe popular in Eastern and Western European politics. Here, economic differences make the relationship between Eastern and Western Europe more symbiotic than equal.

In Lilya 4-Ever, Moodysson shows he is adept at representing the modern world in all its complexity. While his other films centered on tightly knit, almost isolated communities (a Swedish suburb in Show Me Love and a 1970s commune in Together), he uses Lilya’s story to make broad and potent political commentary.