beautiful monsters

4 ever

Just got back from the Rape Crisis fundraiser showing of Lilya 4 Ever. Cripes. Lukas Moodysson (who directed Fucking Åmål and Together before Lilya) says he set out to make a film about God's kindness. It was going to be a story about Jesus walking at the side of a young girl, but he found himself unable to write the part of Jesus. So instead we get; girl in a decaying former Soviet Union town who gets abandoned by her mother, emotionally abused by her aunt, sent to live in a filthy slum, betrayed by her friends, and then sold into prostitution. And the happy ending? Apparently in heaven you get cute fluffy wings.

The people I went to the movie with had to cover their eyes and ears during some of the prostitution (or rather, rape) scenes. Maybe cos I’ve been there, it didn’t have much impact on me. The saddest moments for me actually centred on Lilya’s young friend, Volodya. His desperate desire to get out, to go to the States. His love of everything American. Basketball, Nike… He throws rocks through hoops because he doesn’t have a ball.

I don’t think Lilya was as successful as Moodysson’s earlier films. It needed a bit of humour. No, I’m not belittling the subject matter. Even in the grimmest moments, there can be something to laugh about. And it makes the pain more powerful. The movie got a bit relentless at times; seeing 20 rapes isn’t necessarily 20 times more powerful than seeing one. And the Johns could’ve been a little bit less one-dimensional. In my experience they usually have some traces of humanity. Sheesh, the Malmö that Lilya finds herself in is completely unrecognisable from the Malmö I visited a couple of years ago. Perhaps I was staying over the other side of town.

And personally, I didn’t get the wings. I wanted there to be a glimmer of hope in the form of a moment of human kindness, not some sort of kitsch consolation prize. “Life was a bitch, sorry about that. Here, have some wings.”

Posted by Fionnaigh at November 3, 2003 11:04 PM