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Lilya 4-Ever

Face of the Forsaken

April 18, 2003

(U). Young girl, abandoned and rootless in the former Soviet Union, is swallowed by a maw of corruption. Grim but honest, and young Oksana Akinshina is glorious. With Artiom Bogucharskij, Elina Benenson. Written and directed by Lukas Moodysson. In Russian and Swedish with English subtitles. 1:49 (sex, vulgarity, adult content, glue-sniffing). At Cinema Village, 12th Street near University Place, and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Broadway at 63rd Street, Manhattan.

While Lukas Moodysson's third feature, "Lilya 4-Ever," is starkly modern in its look, feel and cynical regard of the post-wall Eastern bloc, it ends up relying on the oldest of Hollywood cliches for capturing its audience: a face.

The nubile Oksana Akinshina, whose experience had been limited to Russian television, arrives with the inscrutable allure of Garbo and the eloquent impassivity of Isabelle Huppert. That she possesses such a captivating screen presence certainly doesn't hurt the movie's cause - our sympathy for the plight of Akinshina's Lilya, who is abandoned by her mother in an unnamed former USSR city, is dumped by her aunt into a cold-water flat and winds up sucked into a vortex of hunger, exploitation and sexual slavery. And the actress also distracts from our asking the question of exactly what point Moodysson is trying to make.

The abandoned-kid movie is epidemic (leading one to the obvious conclusion that abandoned children are epidemic). "City of God" was the most recent Brazilian version; the documentary "Children Underground" was the Romanian version, and there have been several noticeably more benign American twists on the same sad subject. The problem for the director is keeping things honest; the problem for the audience, knowing that the director is keeping things honest, is also knowing precisely where he's going.

Moodysson, whose "Together" and "Show Me Love" established him as an international filmmaker to be reckoned with, doesn't quite top himself here. Certainly, Lilya's situation is dire: When her mother leaves her behind as she leaves for America, the naive Lilya is exploited by everyone: her aunt, the men she meets in bars, the apparent suitor Andrei (Pavel Ponomarev), who cruelly ships her to enslavement in Sweden, and virtually everyone else around her. Her only friend, the equally abused Volodya (a wonderful young actor named Artiom Bogucharskij) is her only friend, one she comes to appreciate only as her plot thickens and her world dissolves. The faux- spiritual elements Moodysson injects into "Lilya 4-Ever" are less convincing than the blunt grimness of its main plotline. But he probably knew he needed to give us a break.