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Escape Artists: "Lilya 4-ever" and "In This World" Review by Adrian Hyland Last year saw the international release of a number of films dealing with refugees and people-smuggling, and while the appearance, within a few months of each other, of Stephen Frears' "Dirty Pretty Things", Pawel Pawlikowski's "Last Resort", Lukas Moodysson's "Lilya 4-ever" and Michael Winterbottom's "In This World" may not constitute a cinematic movement as such, there seems to be something in the air. What comes across most strongly in these films is a sense of the commitment each of the filmmakers has undertaken: to tell the stories of those members of our societies who can genuinely be called outsiders. It's unlikely mere altruism on these directors' behalf, as this subject matter has great cinematic potential. When 58 Chinese immigrants were discovered dead inside a freight container at the English port Dover a few years ago there was shock, outrage and more than a little curiosity: what kind of lives were these people living that would lead them to consider such an act of desperation? For the English director Michael Winterbottom, whose films are marked by an inquisitive, journalistic sensibility, what happened at Dover was the catalyst for the extraordinary piece of guerilla filmmaking that is his "In This World". The film won the Golden Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival, and continues the exploration of the border between fact and fiction that Winterbottom began in his films "Welcome to Sarajevo" and "24 Hour Party People". If "In This World" can be seen as a logical progression for its director, the same cannot be said of "Lilya 4-ever", the new film from the outrageously talented young Swedish writer/director Lukas Moodysson. Having directed two of the most charming movies of recent years in "Show Me Love" (a.k.a. "Fucking Amal") and "Together", both of which felt like unrestrained celebrations of the generosity of the human spirit, Moodysson now gives us what feels like an unrestrained spilling-over of anger at the coldness and indifference of his fellow man, a scream of rage at a world that sees teenage girls bought and sold across borders into slavery. There have been recent movies that could be described as "hard to watch", depending on one's tolerance for the depiction of various forms of violence and abuse, but this one goes further; never mind hard to watch, "Lilya 4-ever" is spiritually hard to take, because Moodysson takes us inside a world where hope is unrealistic. The film's opening, with the bruised and battered Lilya (played by the 14-year-old Russian actress Oksana Akinshina) stumbling through the streets of an anonymous city to the thunderous accompaniment of Rammstein's peculiarly melodic Euro metal, suggests what we hope will follow: something brutal yet beautiful. As Lilya runs, the camera suddenly tilts skyward, capturing the circular flight of a solitary bird, and we are reminded of Moodysson's daring brand of cinematic poetry, and of his ability to create moments that feel both surprising and pre-ordained. The sequence, perhaps four minutes long, is so powerful that by the time it has ended, with Lilya perched on the railing of a motorway bridge contemplating the drop to the tarmac below, it feels like you've watched an entire movie. The action flashes back in time, we are informed we are now "somewhere in the former Soviet Union", (filming actually took place in Estonia), and the camera follows Lilya through the featureless, stagnant streets that are her neighbourhood. As Moodysson showed in his two previous films, he has the ability to create an intense sense of proximity to his characters, and as we accustom ourselves to Lilya's surroundings, and feel her acceptance of them, the movie begins to take on the claustrophobic quality of a nightmare. In "Show Me Love" and "Together" Moodysson made us believe in the transcendental power of love. In those films the characters carry with them a constant sadness, yet find themselves unexpectedly uplifted when they reach out for the most simple human contact. Perhaps the conclusion of "Together" was a bit far-fetched, with the representatives of seemingly every walk of life engaged in a snowbound game of football to the ecstatic strains of ABBA, but in "Show Me Love" Moodysson was able to suggest the profound sense of communion that teenagers can experience, and there were so many beautiful little surprises that I found myself watching the movie from literally the edge of my seat, wondering what would happen next. It seems Moodysson has undergone a rethink, because in "Lilya 4-ever" there is no hope for anyone, and the element of surprise has been replaced by a surgically precise fatalism. We watch helplessly as Lilya, an energetic, beautiful young girl, is spiritually disembowelled in front of us. She is abandoned by her mother, betrayed by her best friend, gang-raped by local hoods, and finally, having made the horribly easy and inevitable transition into prostitution, she is left with no choice but to put her life in the hands of a charming stranger who promises her a new life in Sweden. Then the movie really gets dark. It has been suggested by The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw that "Lilya 4-ever" is Moodysson's 'mature masterpiece', but I think Bradshaw has inadvertently put his finger on the fact that the opposite is true: the movie is not the work of a mature artist, but that of a brilliant yet raw young director struggling to come to terms with material that is beyond his scope, and over-compensating as a result. From the moment Lilya, realising her mother has deserted her, slumps to her knees and writhes, in slow motion, in a puddle of mud for what seems like an eternity, it becomes clear that Moodysson's aesthetic involves going too far, over the top. This may very well have been a conscious decision: the language of an angry man shouting to make sure he is heard (Moodysson has spoken of his desire to become a 'political' filmmaker). However I think it's more likely that with this material the director ventured beyond the point of personal inspiration, beyond his emotional points of reference, and ended up simply turning everything up to 11 and pummelling the audience with misery. The sense of unpredictability that made "Show Me Love" and "Together" so exhilarating is gone, as is the documentary-like attention to detail that brought Moodysson's characters to life with an immediacy that suggested Mike Leigh or Martin Scorcese. It may be important to note that "Lilya 4-ever" is the first project of Moodysson's to be shot outside of his native Sweden, and most of the dialogue is in either Russian or Estonian. This director is understandably less familiar with the goings-on of teenagers in the former Soviet Union than he is with those in Sweden, and it's unsurprising that the movie's moments feel contrived rather than captured, polemical rather than personal. It's no surprise that Lilya wants to be Britney Spears; it's no surprise that Volodya, her abused young admirer, wants to be Michael Jordan. Volodya spends his time taking shots at a battered old basketball hoop, with a crumpled soft-drink can his substitute for a ball, and the camera lingers, as if to make sure we register just how pathetic this is. Lilya, unable to pay in full, is refused cigarettes at her local supermarket; when she returns there is a huge smile on her face, as she triumphantly hands over the money she has acquired from the sale of her body, and - CLUMP!! - this iron-booted movie makes another ironic point. It may be exactly the movie Moodysson set out to make, but in his anger he has produced a work of didacticism, and "Lilya 4-ever" doesn't breathe; it's too clinical. The director has spoken of his desire to show the world at large the 'way things really are', but his vision of 'reality' is skewed: the worst humanity has to offer is dumped on the only character he allows us to care about, and Moodysson exploits this fast-track to sympathy ruthlessly. Lilya's only hope, the director tells us, is in her faith in God, but the film's didacticism sits mighty uneasily alongside its adolescent religiosity, and the scenes in which Volodya sports angel's wings belong in an early '90s Madonna video. There are moments of real brilliance in this movie, notably the scene in which Lilya and Volodya lose themselves in a glue-induced euphoria on the roof of a tower block, surrendering themselves and dancing wildly as the camera weaves in and out and European techno pounds on the soundtrack. Moodysson is a genius with music; he doesn't fade it in gradually, he injects it like a drug, with such velocity that it transforms and completes a scene instantaneously, and he doesn't hold back on the volume. This director doesn't use music as an embellishment, he uses it for realism, and few other directors have shown the gift he has for creating scenes in which the music reaches out and pulls you into the moment the character is experiencing. Moodysson did this again and again in "Show Me Love" and "Together", and when it happens in "Lilya 4-ever" the movie really takes off, breaking the shackles of its punitive design and achieving an ambiguity that is truly profound and disturbing. The rest of the film, however, seems to have been directed with a kind of crazed ascetic fervour, and the big surprise is that Moodysson has, for this movie at least, turned his back on the intuitive, exploratory storytelling of "Show Me Love" and "Together". Those films, with their notable absence of 'good guys' and 'bad guys', seemed to be the work of a wonderful new talent, a realist Almodovar with a Chekhovian eye for detail. With "Lilya 4-ever" Moodysson has made a conscious decision to use his gift as a means to an end; to make a 'grown up' film, to tell us more than just a story. Perhaps he sees this pseudo-correctional approach as his way forward as he attempts to create something more relevant, more tangible than a mere work of cinematic art. You can't fault his restlessness, or his determination to challenge himself, but I think "Lilya 4-ever" is an artistic step backwards for Moodysson, and though the movie does have heroic aspects, they are buried: nothing seeps through except the director's anger. The subject matter of Michael Winterbottom's "In This World" may be similar to that of "Lilya 4-ever"; both are stories of people desperate enough to attempt an escape from their own lives. However the two films couldn't be more different. Moodysson can't get over the fact that for Lilya the only 'escape' is death, and the director is undistracted by what happens along the way. She may travel between countries, and she may cover geographical distance, but there is no sense of a journey, because Moodysson wants us to experience, from the inside out, what it feels like to be doomed, to have no hope. "In This World", on the other hand, is all about the journey, and Winterbottom doesn't try to pull us inside the world of his pair of travellers; we are kept at a distance from them and experience the wonder and horrors of the journey with them, not through them. There is an interactive quality about this film, and while the questions about how exactly it was made (are these guys actors, are these situations real?) inevitably disrupt the narrative flow, the cumulative effect of these questions is that they draw attention to the act of filmmaking itself, and what is onscreen becomes a simple, powerful message about how much can be achieved with a digital camera and an adventurous spirit. Winterbottom's camera follows two Afghan refugees (Jamal Udin Torabi and Enayatullah Jumaudin) as they make their journey by land and sea from the Pakistani refugee camp of Shamshatoo to what they hope will be their final destination, England. Along the way we are exposed to the uncertainties of life on the road in parts of the world rarely seen on a cinema screen, and the film introduces us, through its protagonists, to the sensibility of the refugee. Jamal and Enayatullah are as flexible as they have to be to keep moving, and when they hit an obstacle they regather themselves and approach it from a different angle. There is no explanation of why they are doing what they are doing; the answer is in the relentlessness of their actions. There is no 'backstory', no 'character development', yet we become attached to Jamal and Enayatullah because they seem real, and the memory of their faces, their attitudes, still resonates strongly for me months after seeing the film. Unlike "Lilya 4-ever", "In This World" doesn't assault you with its subject matter; Winterbottom lets the viewer find his own way into the story, and where Moodysson uses music as a jolt, for immediacy, the synthesiser music in "In This World" is full of distance, and Winterbottom uses it to weave together the different chapters in the journey of his refugees. Without wishing to state the obvious, "In This World" is some achievement, not just logistically speaking (although I would love to see a documentary about the making of this film) but in its understated romanticism, and in its restraint. By taking us to parts of the world previously unvisited by the cinema, and by showing us his escape artists' courage from a bird's eye view, Michael Winterbottom has created something that stands apart, both as a film and as a political statement. — Adrian Hyland studied post-production at South Seas Film & Television School. He now works as a news editor at TV3. |