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Verdict: A wrenching feel-bad movie graced by a luminous central performance.

By STEVE MURRAY
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Strip Federico Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria" entirely of hope, or imagine an even more depressing version of "Last Exit to Brooklyn," and you'd have "Lilya 4-Ever."

When a plump new basketball shows up in this film, it's not a question of if but when it will be punctured. In this relentless drama, if bad can go to worse, it will. Just when you think fate could get no crueler to the characters, one more hidden trapdoor bangs open to hurl them farther down.

Doesn't sound like much of a recommendation, huh? Actually Lukas Moodysson's film exerts a grim fascination, mainly thanks to Oksana Akinshina's luminous performance as a Russian 16-year-old whose life becomes an endless series of betrayals.

Living with her unmarried mother in a bunkerlike apartment building, Lilya kills her days skipping school, sniffing glue with pals, and hanging out with a younger boy, Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), in an abandoned submarine factory. A sliver of light hits this dead-end life when her mother announces that her boyfriend, a Russian living in the United States, wants to take them with him to the States.

Well, um, actually . . . Lilya's mom then decides she'd rather go alone with her beau and send for her daughter later. Sometime. Maybe. When Lilya, in tears, pursues her mother's departing car and falls splat on her knees in a patch of mud, it's the movie's iconic image -- an early indicator that things are going nowhere good.

Left to fend for herself after being shunted to a cramped, filthy flat by a selfish aunt who covets her apartment, Lilya finds an easy way to make a few extra bucks. Hanging out at a nightclub with a fellow underage girl, she starts turning tricks with older guys.

While she's resorted to the most grown-up sort of business, Lilya retains a sweet innocence. It doesn't matter to her where the money came from, she's girlishly buoyant at being able to buy as much junk food as she wants and that basketball for Volodya.

The kids' babes-in-the-urban-woods relationship is the heart of "4-Ever." When their bond is threatened by a too-good-to-be-true sweet-talker (Pavel Ponomaryov) who wants to take Lilya with him to Sweden, it's like a horror movie moment: You want to lean toward the screen and shout, "Don't go there."

Life in Sweden, Lilya brutally finds, turns out to be even more of a trap; prostitution becomes not an occasional gig, but an enforced grind. Using a point-of-view camera shot of endless johns heaving on top of Lilya, director Moodysson gives us such a vivid sense of what it's like to be a sex worker, you can almost smell the stale sweat.

What keeps the movie endurable, even riveting, is Akinshina's performance. The young actress has an emotional translucency that lights the screen even in the movie's darkest moments. Ironically, her beautifully natural work makes Lilya's story even more wrenching.

At one point, Volodya leads Lilya to the roof of an apartment building and offers her a Christmas gift: the whole world, spread beneath them in the thin, wintry light. "Sorry," Lilya says, "but I'm not sure it's a good present."

It's to the film's credit that you hope against hope, despite everything she's suffered, that Lilya will change her mind about that.