Lilja 4-ever
Lilja 4-Ever opens with a bruised and battered Lilja (Oksana Akinshina) ready to jump from a road bridge, and then jumps back three months to explain how she reached this situation.
It all starts off so positively. Lilja’s mother (Lyubov Agapova) has met an American through a dating agency and Lilja is looking forward to travelling with her to the US to start a new life away from the grinding poverty of her native post-communist Russia.
Then her mother drops her bombshell. She and Lilja’s stepfather to be have decided that it would be better all round if Lilja stays in Russia for now, to be sent for at a later date. Abandoned, humiliate and betrayed things only get worse for Lilja from here on in.
16 year old Lilja has been left, ostensibly, in the care of her Aunt Anna (Liliya Shinkaryova) who promptly turfs Lilja out of her home, insisting that it’s too big for her, and moves her into a much smaller – and frankly disgusting – flat that has become vacant following the death of the previous occupant.
After her mother disowns her, Lilja finds herself alone – abandoned by most of the people she knows - with no money, no food, no heating and no electricity. The only friend who has stayed loyal to her is Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), an eleven year old boy who has been kicked out of his home by an abusive father and winds up staying with Lilja.
Eventually, inevitably, she drifts into prostitution to make ends meet…
The environment in which Lilja’s finds herself is both grim and violent and the film is a very downbeat one, so much so that it could easily have become an unwatchably nihilistic experience. What raises it from this, and keeps you involved throughout, is the character of Lilja herself.
Oksana Akinshina does a fantastic job of drawing you into Lilja’s world and communicating her strength of character throughout. Although the vast majority of the characters that Lilja encounters are at best uncaring and at worst deliberately cruel, the film, by siding so clearly with the main character, never comes across as being either cruel or exploitative. Even when you can see the mistakes that Lilja is making and even when you can see the inevitable consequences of those mistakes, you can also understand exactly how she reached those decisions and, still, you find yourself desperately wanting things to come right.
Lilja 4-Ever is, however, a bleak film and one that is, ultimately, about people trafficking and an exploration of the sort of desperation that leads people to believe in obviously empty promises. As such, it is a film that had much to say about the issues and debates surrounding illegal immigration when it was released in 2002. It probably has even more to say about these issues today.
Tuesday 04 Jul 2006 | Paul Pritchard | Drama
