'Lilya' takes a stark look at an abandoned teen's life

Like 16-year-olds everywhere, Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) loves the grand gesture. Her circumstances simply don't allow them to stay grand.

She lives in a bleak suburb in the former Soviet Union, which she thinks she's escaping because her mother's new Russian lover is moving them to America. Except on the eve of departure Lilya discovers she isn't going. Her mother makes noises that they'll send for her; but, alone, the mother coos to her lover that soon it'll be just the two of them.

This leads to Lilya's first grand gesture. After an emotionally exhausting farewell scene — in which Lilya, at first petulantly silent behind a gossip magazine, breaks down and begs her mother not to abandon her — she tears up her mother's photo and throws the pieces into a corner. A minute later, she attempts to put them back together again. It's regret over the grand gesture, more than the gesture itself, which endears her to us, because it indicates how large her heart is.

If "Lilya 4-Ever," the new film from Swedish wunderkind Lukas Moodysson ("Show Me Love," "Together"), is reminiscent of any story, it's "Black Beauty." A helpless creature keeps changing hands in a downward cycle.

With Lilya's mother gone, Aunt Anna boots Lilya from her colorful apartment and into a cramped, stained flat. Social Services provides little service. Her friend Natasha deflects her own whoring onto Lilya, and thus ruins her reputation. The only one she can count on is Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), an 11-year-old boy with an odd-shaped head who plays basketball with a crushed aluminum can in their crumbling tenement courtyard.

These are the abandoned children of the once-mighty Soviet empire. Volodya's father used to work at a nearby military base, closed now, where Lilya and Volodya run around, stare at Lenin murals, read from an old Brezhnev speech and sniff glue. At a glue-sniffing party in Lilya's flat, old war medals are discovered and mockingly placed upon a stoned teenager.

They have freedom now, but little hope and imagination. When an angel tells Lilya the world is hers, he gestures to a gray urban landscape without a trace of greenery — which is all Lilya can imagine the world to be.

Needing money, she tries to sell her own dingy trinkets but finds no takers; the only takers are for her. Lilya's smug satisfaction at finally being able to buy the crinkly, colorful, prepackaged foodstuffs at a local mart is sadder than the sex act that preceded it.

Eventually transactions become more direct: sex in exchange for McDonald's. Brutal communism has been replaced by brutal capitalism.

Throughout, Akinshina as Lilya is wholly authentic. She's cute but tomboyish, and horribly gawky when she runs. Attempting sophistication, she looks younger than ever, and her face, when made up, looks bruised. There are a few moments of unnecessary melodrama (Moodysson is in his early 30s) and welcome religious overtones (it began as a film about God's benevolence), but mostly "Lilya" is stark and unblinking. Try not to blink.

Erik Lundegaard: elundegaard@earthlink.net