Bought and Sold: Lukas Moodysson's LILYA 4-EVER

What is intriguing for me about Lukas Moodysson's 2002 feature, LILYA 4-EVER is it's pumped-up honesty. This is a film about a bored Russian girl, who is impoverished and lives in the suburban slums. Whose mother deserts her to go off and live with her boyfriend. Who is broke and has to become a prostitute to at least engage in the capitalist dream of buying whatever she likes at the grocery store. And her story is infused with a vicious clubber track, 9-volt jolts of synth-charged excitement that help keep the story moving along. Helping it to offer some quick rush of escape. It's directed by a Swedish director that's only traveled "a little bit" in Russia. LILYA 4-EVER strives to tell one of those "it's only going to get predictably worse" stories that Lars von Trier is so good at. And like von Trier, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's film seems to be about the capitalist dream, the romance you'll see in a Hollywood movie or the satisfying release that shoppers find in commercials. Just hours before Lilya jumps off a Swedish highway bridge into oncoming traffic, she says to herself "I want a doll, a pencil to draw with, and a handbag." Moodysson's films are tuned into this sort of frequency. He fills his narratives with the flustered, obsessive awe of commercialism. All his films seem to be lists of wants.

Take his 2006 experimental film, Container. It starts out: "I don't want to be locked up inside this disgusting body anymore. Everything bleeds and stinks." You could look at Moodysson's films as a confrontation between the commercial dream and the reality. That capitalist comes at a cost. And that the cost isn't broadcast; isn't typically the subject of so many films. But I think Moodysson's work says it ought to be. And he comes to film with this sort of critical social consciousness.

"You remain dead for all eternity, but you're alive for only a brief moment." Lilya's younger friend tells her, in the form of an angel come back from the dead while she's enslaved as a prostitute in Sweden. She's contemplating her suicide. Maybe that will undo her suffering. The whole film is essentially a portrait of Lilya's suffering. Lilya in the commercial landscape. As someone who won't be known. Who is faceless. Who is the girl in the hundreds of thousands of pornos made each year that's forced into it by a relentless industry. Who is persecuted by the police when she's running around in a foreign country without papers or identification.

LILYA 4-EVER is sort of genius in the way that Moodysson tackles such an apt-for-exploitation, could-be-sentimentalized subject. He shoots Lilya as the face of the girl who is like the waste by-product of commercialism. This is commercialism's worst face. When she's pale and undernourished later in the film, and is forced to go out with a client, she goes to the bathroom and chops her hair off, smears lipstick over her face like a clown. It's one of the most effective moments of the film.


Moodysson, like von Trier, chooses the subject of the commercial dream and it's errors. In the end, Lilya ends up in a sort of heaven on a roof in the Russian industrial ghetto, playing basketball with her dead friend, who also killed himself. According to THIS Moodysson interview, Moodyson claims that ""Lilya" is a statement about human dignity, a quality that is constantly being eroded and corrupted in the world today by forces like political systems and a materialistic culture that allows anything and everything to be bought or sold." The film is also a fuck-you to the system.

Incidentally, just a few days ago Moodyson released the trailer for his latest film, Mammoth. It seems to track some of the same themes that appear in all his work: the industrial landscape, desensitization, excess, etc. Check out the trailer below. It looks promising, as all Moodysson trailers do.