In the first minutes of Lukas Moodysson’s follow-up to his 2001 Together, its 15-year-old heroine falls crying in the mud, abandoned by her mother’s departing car (for ever). Serially and cruelly deceived by virtually everyone in her life from this point forward, Lilja turns tricks in a bar for money, and is eventually conned into sexual slavery in Sweden. A classic melodrama pinned to a major international human-rights issue (the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe for the Western and Central European sex trade), Moodysson’s film is most powerful as an evocation of its heroine’s psychological state, of the distance between her grim everyday existence and her significantly brighter dream-life. Post-Soviet Russia provides an apt setting, and Moodysson uses urban space—old Stalinist projects, bird’s-eye views of Stockholm—to great effect. Buildings, symbols of damaged domesticity or commerce, entrap and endanger; up on the roof, however, the constraints disappear (the ambition of flight is a theme that runs throughout the film). Lijla and her only friend, little Volodya, wander through the Tarkovskian space of a forgotten factory abandoned, as it were, in mid-gasp, reviewing their own damaged beginnings. In Moodysson’s competent, confident hands, would-be cliches like this become pregnant with meaning—both for the state of a childhood poised between innocence and its loss and for a country with an equally uncertain future. But credit for the film’s success as both a social document and acute personal drama is chiefly due to its young protagonists, Oksana Akinshina (Lilja) and Artyom Bogucharsky (Volodya). The two, both non-actors, evoke their roles with unself-conscious openness. They are world-weary but playful, self-conscious but doggedly innocent—and above all, determined to exist.
—ALICE LOVEJOY