Thursday, January 11, 2007

Lilya 4-Ever

Scraping the barrel for the DVDs we haven’t seen yet Eran and I ended up watching the Bourne Supremacy. We had actually been trying, unsuccessfully, to see it for some time now, ever since Lizzy and Aisla told us they were in the back of a shot, during the beginning scenes filmed in Goa, buying toothpaste! Although in the end we didn’t spot them. Still, it was quite funny watching Matt Damon running along the same stretch of Palolem Beach that Eran ran most mornings…



But, anyway, the point of me mentioning this at all, was to comment on how randomly coincidental it turned out to be that the Bourne Supremacy was the next film we saw after watching Lilya 4-Ever. When I say we’ve been scraping up the dregs of our remaining films, I’m not including in that Lilya 4-Ever: with that film it was just a case of waiting for a moment when we felt we had the psychological and emotional reserves to watch it through! In this place, as you might imagine, that took quite a long time, and it was more like deciding to just go for it and take the plunge, then actually feeling prepared and ready for it!

I still don’t feel really able to talk about Lilya 4-Ever – I’m not sure I ever will! And once you get me started on human/sex-trafficking… and then prostitution… and then pornography… then I never shut-up! And I start boring myself!! So I’m not going to go there… not yet, at least…



But – and I do realise how logically silly it is – although in my head I prefer to think of silly logic as poetic justice! – I can’t say how much of a relief it was to see Oksana Akinshina alive and well (though still very sad!) in Russia, as the daughter of the couple Bourne killed during his first operation (sorry – I really should make a spoiler alert before just blurting!). Although she has a teeny tiny part, which in my humble opinion is wasting her incredible acting talent, and she could have acted the socks off anyone else in that film… Oh well…



The point is, that I was so shell-shocked after Lilya 4-Ever – in a way that I didn’t really know how to deal with it – that I was grateful to the Bourne Supremacy for giving me some kind of closure, albeit from an utterly unlikely and very unexpected source! Of course I know that the issues addressed have no such closure, poetic or otherwise – they are there, hidden, but always present; a gaping open-wound of human degradation, exploitation, concealment, and pain – but in fairy-tale land, at least I can know that Lilya lives on, engraved into consciousness, her signature, in the guise of Oksana Akinshina, etching out more hopeful futures…



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3 comments:

jenglo said...

Want to test how to do (blockquote)a blockquote wot is proper like.(/blockquote)Has it worked?

thury said...

Thank you Jenny. Love your posts.

jenglo said...

no it didn't work - bums!

Thanks Thury. When are you going to start keeping a blog??