or something." Instead, Lilya's new employer meets her at the airport, locks her in a room, rapes her, and sells her to an endless procession of johns--encapsulated in a harrowing close-up series of contorted faces, sweaty necks, grunting mouths. This grotesquely effective sequence conveys the systematic dehumanization of Lilya while admirably sparing the young Akinshina from having to simulate it further.

Newmarket Films

Together alone: Oksana Akinshina and Elina Benenson in 'Lilya 4-Ever'

A staple of the European press is the terrible tale of the naïve girl from a former Eastern Bloc country: She responds to an advertisement for domestic work abroad, then finds herself trapped in a brothel. The inconvenient reality, however, is that the vast majority of these women know what they're getting into from the start. The sextrade in large swaths of Sweden has been taken over by gangs from Estonia, where prostitution is legal and the age of consent is 16--the same as Lilya's. An unwilling, inexperienced girl is too risky an investment with so many complicit candidates already available.

But Moodysson knows that the terrain of "complicity" is an impossibly murky one when you're talking about ill-educated young people with no money, no job prospects, and nothing to lose. Lilya's descent into hell may be too deep, unrelenting, and unwitting to work as a case study of the ravages wrought by market bolshevism and gangster rule; if the director had intended to make a straight docudrama, he might have focused on Natasha, who's chillingly casual about selling out both herself and her friend. Instead,