And it pains me to say it, but he is barely three months older than me. You may know him from Tillsammans (Together), which was playing at Angelica NYC in the months after 9/11, and which was the first movie to get me laughing out loud again.
 
Friday night, I finally got to see Lukas Moodysson’s Lilja 4-ever — a movie that leaves no doubt he is one of the best directors working today.

Lilja 4-ever joins only two other movies that are so compelling in their trajectory towards despair that I dread watching them again: Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves. Interestingly, all three depict resourceful women who come undone by a trust in others that borders on the naive.

In Lilja 4-ever, we watch how a 16-year old Russian girl (Lilja, played brilliantly by Oksana Akinshina) is forced into prostitution in Sweden. Most of the film takes place in Russia and is in Russian, but the scenes in Sweden are what have caused the most impact here. For Lilja’s clients are affluent Swedes, and Moodysson leaves no doubt that they are abettors to the crime.

Stylewise, we see some dogme influence, with abrupt cuts and shaky camera work. But Moodysson veers away from that esthetic when it suits him: Rammstein, Germany’s answer to hard rock, plays at crucial moments.There is a soundtrack, for example, though it exists to express Lilja’s inner turmoil, not to tug at the audience’s heartstrings.

When you see the movie, you will be struck by echoes of the imagery in Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire). But unlike that movie, and Breaking the Waves, where the last scene annoyingly insists on the reality of a miracle, Lilja 4-ever never passes into spiritual la-la land. Moodysson is a socially committed filmmaker, and he is not going to let a facile religious redemption make everything alright. In his movies, the only angels are the ones you make yourself.