Bleak and overwhelming, this is a movie that has haunted me since I first saw it. Lukas Moodysson’s best film is also one of the best Swedish films of all time, up there with Bergman and Andersson’s. This is as uncompromising a film there is, shot in whatever hellhole location in Estonia they dug up to stand in for Soviet Russia - and the feeling of humanity’s grime and decay lingers all these years later.
Christiane F. and Lilya 4-Ever are always linked in my mind because they’re both grim, depressing art hoe teen movies about suicidal girls growing up in the asscracks of Europe and spiraling into drugs, prostitution and abuse.
Some hoes stan Mean Girls as the ultimate teen flick but these 2 are for Edgelord bitches who did their makeup like Sasha Grey, read about serial killers, listened to Einstürzende Neubauten and were on Prozac.
Literally imagine being a depressed girl in 80s Berlin at least you could go to a David Bowie concert and do coke. Lilya is worse bc she’s in a Soviet Bloc country living in Novostroika during the era where Putin orchestrated FSB apartment bombings.
But just how they represent the shitty non-glorified reality of being a teen or early 20s or whatever even life after that. When you drunkenly apply lipstick in a McDonald’s bathroom during a night out, or take a long train ride back home after meeting your friends and you’re like wow. I want to kill myself for some reason / I’m suffering from the existential emptiness that comes with being a modern woman in an urban environment.