Lilya-4-Ever
Lukas Moodysson

Emilie Bickerton

What ought to be, and what is. Taking a long, hard look at this world, specifically the former Soviet Union and the illegal child sex trade in Western Europe, Lukas Moodysson has found a disparity between the two, which is tearing his ideals apart.

The film opens with Rammstein's 'Burning Heart' booming out to the image of a young girl, running helplessly and ominously towards a bridge. The optimism the Swedish director has previously been noted for (exposing commune living in Together and exploring adolescence in Show Me Love) appears to have vanished. It is exactly the same uncompromising belief in human nature, however, only explored through the bleakest of kaleidoscopes, which informs this third film.

Whenever he can, Moodysson dwells on remarkable friendships, on snatched attempts at happiness and togetherness in the most uncompromising environment. In particular, he dwells on the courage of his protagonist, Lilya (Oksana Akinsjina). In this light one might consider Lilya-4-Ever a brave humanist counterpoint to the more utopian (In This World) or caricatured (Dirty Pretty Things) recent attempts by film-makers to look at the problems met by asylum seekers around the world.

Not so fast. Misplaced spirituality, stock bogeymen and sneaky humanitarianism let down this otherwise striking and powerful film. The moments of hope exist outside reality. The recently deceased Volodya returns, white-winged, watching over his only friend, and whispering help. In dreams the two play together on the rooftops, as though the beatitudes were true, and the meek will inherit the earth.

Certainly, this is an effective way of emphasising the absolute poverty of opportunity for Lilya in the real world. At every failed turn you realise there was little alternative. Even the fact that her mother abandons her is strangely inconsequential, as other adults are bullies, or pathetically selfish. When Lilya repeats the abandonment, leaving Vol to go to Sweden with Andrei, you don't condemn her decision, but understand that this is what her life chances amount to.

In an early scene, we witness Lilya's initial stubbornness to survive. She inscribes on a bench her name, and effectively her intention to stay '4-Ever' in the world, even in the face of bitter animosity. This makes Lilya's increasing disillusion with the world all the more tragic. Later, standing on the rooftops, a white-winged Vol visits her again and offers her a present, 'the whole world'. Looking out at the barren scene, the idea that there is anything special about the whole world is difficult to accept, 'No offence, but I don't think much of your present'. It's a strange, extremely sad scene, as she expresses disillusion not at what she has, but of everything that she doesn't have. In that sense it is a rejection on an aspirational level as much as anything else, a final supression of all hope.

But what has Moodysson achieved by depicting this absence of choice so lucidly? He conjures barren landscapes at every turn, but the realism of the picture does not explain why Lilya has no choices, beyond perhaps some perpetual Big Other who steals the dreams of children as they sleep. In deploring the absence of choice, one might assume Moodysson valourises political freedoms, material and technological improvements, a dynamic and progressive society in which people like Lilya and Vol could at least have the opportunity to fulfil their potential.

It is here, however, that the real ambiguity of Moodysson's social and political commentary (also present in Together) is most obvious. His retreat into the fantasy and the spiritual is a rejection of anything more tangible. If the point is that there is nothing else, then his anger as well as his hope seems useless.

When it comes to the idea of America, and how this captures the dreams and aspirations of many children living in such deprivation, Moodysson is most evasive. Certainly there is something naïve about Lilya's love of America, but is it the false expectation or the very aspiration?

While the greatest of its beneficiaries, still seduced by capitalist promises, are mourning the realisation that yoga, pilates and lattes won't actually bring you happiness (shocking but true), when Lilya shouts out that she's going to 'America! America!' she isn't talking about particular goods but simply that she might have the choice between them. America, perhaps more as symbol, encapsulates her aspiration to a better life, to one with opportunity, and the freedom of choice without brute material struggle and political coercion.

But Moodysson seems doubtful about the virtues of this better life. Lilya, in a plentiful rather than barren context at the airport, reverently stares at the stacks of perfume and cosmetics. On the plane she is presented with a meal, neatly prepared and packaged. She stares again, intrigued. These are brief moments, but Moodyson seems to be making more than a simple and valid point about her exclusion from the things that others (most probably the majority of the audience) take for granted.

Rather, it appears to be a cynical wink in the direction of his audiences, who all apparently know what the Promised Land really means. Whispering, in Madonnaesque style, that these things won't make you happy, and perhaps the real aspiration ought to be for fields, green grass and fresh air. For lurking beneath the veneer of abundance in the Swedish welfare state are sordid suburban fantasies ready to exploit the illegal sex trade.

But material abundance, while not about to bring you happiness will at least allow you to live rather than merely survive, and to change and develop from your immediate circumstances. This gives meaning to choice, but Moodysson seems unsure. It isn't that he romanticises poverty: the desperate circumstances go some way in explaining the abandonment of Lilya's mother and the selfishness of her aunt; in such circumstances the need to survive predominates. Yet alternatives are cast under an equally desolate shadow.

There is something to be said for making such a bleak film, addressing one of the most pertinent political issues of the day (asylum), yet still imbuing the narrative with a sustained ode to both the world and human beings. You emerge more embittered than totally battered (as with the Irreversible effect, following Gaspar Noe's motto that 'Time Destroys Everything', the future as well as the past).

Yet in many ways, Moodysson strikes me as a director with ideals rather than ideas, as his anger at the state of things seems directed in strange, sometimes only superficial directions. He is pointing out that this world is one in which dreams are corrupted, 'I am the voice from the pillow… Now dear little children, pay attention… They come to you in the night, demons, ghosts, black fairies…'. Dreams here are being corrupted, are ripped away by adults, by mothers, by selfish aunts, by desperate illegal traders, and by Swedish fathers harbouring dirty fantasies.

Still, Moodysson offers more than nihilism: there is the sense throughout that nothing about this state of affairs is inevitable. The trail of deception, abandonment, brutality and exploitation Lilya leaves behind, isn't inevitable. And that this is not the case is what is making Lukas Moodysson so angry, so very, very angry. Cue Rammstein. Cue a fleeting set of images (blink and you'll miss it) in which things are put right, as Lilya picks up the dropped potatoes for her landlady, handing them back with a smile, rather than (as she really did), running past her, screaming 'potato hag' in her face. This clumsy moral fix suggests that Moodysson is unable to make a more meaningful connection between what is and what ought to be.

Invoking his more optimistic vision of human nature and human life through spirituality and fantasy has a double-edged effect. Rightly and powerfully it captures the absence of choices - reality crushing dreams rather than making them. But when causes are alluded to the explanation seems childlike.

Moodysson tries to summon up a little hatred in his audience by pointing the camera only and unflinchingly in the face of the men Lilya is forced to have sex with. The fact that we can't see Lilya in these scenes forces us to imagine her, and consequently empathise in a way that is far from comfortable. There is a sense that we are all being violated. The technique succeeds in making you angry, even hating for a brief second. But that hatred dissipates quickly into the emotional void it came from, insofar as you've been presented less with the source of the problem (culpable as the men are), than a symptom.

Moodysson's implication of universal violation is central to the film's philosophy. Although largely articulated only by his angels, his ethereal solutions can be given a name. Rather than a humanism, it is humanitarianism. On the UK film posters for the film we are asked to join UNICEF's UK Child Exploitation campaign to ensure children's rights are upheld to protect them against abuse, neglect, discrimination and violence.

I suppose the idea here is that coming out of the film we'll all be so appalled, so disgusted and desperate that we'll sign up. I have a strange vision of hundreds of cinema-goers tearful, with pen in hands, signing up, for the love of God! It's a strange vision because fundamentally asylum and child exploitation are political issues, and UNICEF places itself explicitly outside the political sphere.

The moral case against such treatment of children hardly needs to be made. But the problems faced by asylum-seekers and the blight of the illegal sex trade will not be solved at the level of morality or with the rhetoric of human rights. Of course we shouldn't expect a movie to solve them at all, but by presenting things the way he does and encouraging his audience to sign up for UNICEF's campaign, Moodyson offers a false solution. At a time when the meaning of individual civil and political rights more broadly remains elusive, the children's rights model succeeds merely in transforming the rights holder into an object of law, inverting those rights into externally imposed decrees.

When political issues are being couched as moral ones, or explained through this emotive prism, invoking human rights seems a logical choice. Moodysson seems to believe in a set of absolute values. He is too caught up in juxtaposing what is and what ought to be to really target reality. It makes me feel that it's not so much a burning heart we're being offered, as an empty one.

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