Over-sentimentalised woe

Swedish director Lukas Moodysson has had two hits in a row. In Show Me Love, he empathised with small-town boredom. In Together, he satirised commune living in the Seventies that turned into communal squabbling. But in Lilja 4-ever, his agenda feels tired, if certainly more serious and altogether more gruelling.

Lilja (Oksana Akinshina) is an immature 16-year-old, deserted when her mother goes to America with her no-account lover, turfed out of her flat on a post-Soviet sink estate by a heartless property-grabbing aunt and befriended by another dead-end kid (Artyom Bogucharsky).

She drifts into glue-sniffing, then amateur prostitution and falls into the trap of believing that the nice chap in a collar and tie who takes her out without raping her on the way back will set her up in a new life in Sweden. Once over the frontier, the unbelievably naive girl is locked in a bleak flat, exploited as a sex slave and only taken out and around the town to be banged by a series of panting gents, seen head-and-shoulders only as they bear down on her.

We have seen it all before. The victimhood and miserabilism are laid on so thickly that the emotional relief offered by Lilja's fixation on a holy picture, showing a guardian angel, feels like kitsch - and becomes so when she and her playmate return from heaven wearing the cute little angel wings you see in school Nativity plays.

For all its tough look at environment - actually Estonia - Lilja 4-Ever is as sentimental as many a second-rate, silent-era, tear-jerker. The social questions it raises are real enough; its sentimentality is what makes one doubt Moodysson is Ingmar Bergman's heir. Not by a long sob.