Lilya 4-ever - Plot

Plot

The film starts with a figure running desperately towards a motorway bridge, with a factory belching smoke in the background, to a soundtrack of Mein Herz brennt by Rammstein. When the figure turns around the film introduces the audience to Lilja, who has recently been brutally beaten. The film reveals her past.

Lilja lives a fairly bleak life with her mother in a run down apartment block in a squalid, poor town in an unnamed former republic of the Soviet Union (principal filming took place in Paldiski, Estonia). For all intents and purposes she is a normal teenage girl (albeit an impoverished one). Lilja's mother tells her they are emigrating to the United States with her new boyfriend, but at the last minute Lilja is left behind, in the care of her aunt. A forced move into a squalid flat (while the Aunt moves herself into the larger, nicer flat that Lilja and her mother had lived in) is only the beginning, and a succession of miseries are heaped upon Lilja. Lilja's best friend encourages her to join her in prostituting herself for extra cash, though Lilja decides not to follow through. However, when the friend's father finds the money the friend claims that she was the one who sat at the bar while Lilja prostituted herself. Not content with ruining Lilja's reputation at home, the story soon goes round school. As Lilja has been abandoned, she now really does have to prostitute herself for money to live. One glimmer of hope is her friend Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), abused and rejected by his alcoholic father, with whom she forms a tender protective relationship. She buys Volodya a basketball with money she has earned as a prostitute, but Volodya's father punctures it with a pair of scissors. Another glimmer of hope is Andrei (Pavel Ponomaryov), who becomes her boyfriend and offers her a job in Sweden. But all is not what it seems, and only bad things await Lilja when she arrives there.

After arriving in Sweden, she is greeted by her future "employer" (in reality, a pimp) and taken to a nearly empty apartment where he imprisons her and rapes her. Lilja is then forced to perform sexual acts for a large number of clients; all the abuse is seen from Lilja's point of view.

Meanwhile in the former Soviet Union, Volodya commits suicide, devastated that Lilja had abandoned him to his fate. In the form of an angel, Volodya comes to Lilja to watch over her. On Christmas Day, he transports Lilja to the roof of the apartment, and gives Lilja the world as a present, but she simply finds it cold and unwelcoming. After one escape attempt Lilja is brutally beaten by her pimp, but she then escapes again. Finally, and much to the distress of Volodya (who regrets having killed himself) she commits suicide herself in the continuation of the scene from the beginning of the film by jumping from the bridge.

The film's conclusion shows two alternate versions of events: a. Lilja and Volodya, now both dead, angelic and happily playing basketball on the roof of some tenement building, safe from all harm the world can do to them. b. It is also shown that somehow Lilja was sent back in time to when she made the decision to go to Sweden with Andrei (possibly as a result of the deceased Volodya's intervention). In essence she finds herself exactly at the moment she first made the decision, however this time she rejects Andrei's offer to go to Sweden and she and Volodya are shown to presumably live happier lives.