Lilya 4-Ever

(Note: this piece contains major spoilers)

The film Lilya 4-Ever is not a police procedural or any kind of typical crime story. I remember I was reluctant to see it at the time it came out, in 2002, even though I was a fan of Lukas Moodysson’s other films, because I could not quite take the subject matter. Moodysson himself said he felt disconnected from the film after making it, because the story did not reflect his own background or experience. A young Lithuanian woman, who had been trafficked into Sweden, had thrown herself off a bridge near where he lived. He kept passing the spot where she had jumped, and made the film because he felt an obligation toward her—he wanted to give voice to someone like her, even if he could not reproduce her exact life history.

Because the film starts with Lilya on the bridge, before tracing the steps she took to get there, I caught a whiff of Anna Karenina about the story from the beginning. So it was interesting to learn that Moodysson’s inspiration paralleled Tolstoy’s, in that he was imagining a background for a real person at the heart of a tragic incident.

Much of the emotion driving Anna K. is her remorse about the separation from her son. Lilya 4-Ever begins with a similar separation—Lilya, a girl from “somewhere in the former Soviet Union,” expects to go to America with her mother and her new boyfriend, but as the departure nears, Lilya’s mother informs her that she is being left behind. In addition to the abandonment and immediate worsening of her circumstances, she has to deal with the crashing of all her hopes for another life. This is what leaves her vulnerable to later promises of a better fate.

Lilya’s circumstances are not great to begin with. The housing estate where she lives is an ancient wreck of a place with peeling walls and rusted-out hulls of cars on the remains of its grassy areas. Yet, as she discovers, she can fall lower and lower—and lower still. First, her aunt displaces her in her old apartment, forcing her into smaller, dingier quarters in an even worse building in the complex. Then her electricity in the new place is turned off. And, worse, she learns that her mother never wanted her and left assuming that social services would manage her life going forward. But the only sign of intervention from the government was the shutting off of services. They do not offer help of any kind. Her one consolation is a younger neighbor—kicked out of his own house—who starts sleeping on her floor and turns out to be good company in this otherwise unbearable time. Unfortunately, she is only 16 and does not have the wherewithal to take care of him, and has to abandon him in much the same fashion her mother abandoned her.

Even as I recount the sequence of events, I can see Moodysson’s point about losing sight of the contours of the story because it is not his own. Telling a Dickensian tale of hardship before rescue feels artificial in itself. A story of hardship where the rescue turns out to be a false hope feels somehow more unreal. The unrelenting quality of the narrative creates the sense of crashing through a barrier or descending an extra, hidden set of stairs into some kind of sub-basement. The structure of the story seems to fold in on itself. In truth, of course, Moodysson is probably telling as sensible or straightforward a version of the life of a trafficking victim as he can. How could such a story relent? And what would the story look like with no hope at all?

After several attempts to resist the pull of the one way she can make ready cash, Lilya goes to a club in the city center where she can meet a man and go home with him. As unpleasant as this is, it’s nothing compared to what happens to her after she meets a friendly young man who seems like he wants nothing from her except companionship. He turns out to be the gateway into real danger. His offer of affection is a trap.

Moodysson may feel that he failed in presenting an honest story, or one he had a complete handle on, but I appreciated the attempt to see trafficking through the eyes of a victim, rather than some kind of investigator or other outsider. I appreciated the attempt to even guess what such a life might be like. It felt rare and important, even if it was hard to avoid melodrama or a feeling of unreality. Part of art is failure. Part of it is the attempt to tell hard stories. Eventually someone may hit closer to the mark, but at least he aimed for that particular neglected board.