My deleted review

abstract/modern/jazz/nonsense music. When the Romanian band started emitting this sound in the beginning of the movie I knew it would stink

Do you know why the traditional Roumanian jazz was fused with a pastiche of modern West European and American jazz?If you figure that out, you'll figure out what the film means, every episode in the film will suddenly make sense, you'll realize the double irony of your Fanta comment (director is condemning shallow fake western art and western commercialism and commodification, and Fanta reminds me of Fantine from Les Miserables, a book whose themes of child and female exploitation parallel those of Lilja and Biblioteque), and the error of your Lilja-4-Ever comment (themes of both films are exactly the same).

The characters are underdeveloped

They don't need to be developed because they are synedoches; they represent a whole and the whole is self-explanatory.Every episode in the film is a metaphor for the depraved deadened West whose senses can only be stimulated in extreme sadistic overdrive by feeding on and bloodletting and destroying the East [including Eastern Europe], particularly females.Every trial Mona endures is a metaphor representing the West exploiting and destroying deeply-rooted tradition and culture and purely organic creativity and females and children to satiate the depraved/sadistic sex drives and other deviant subcultures of, and maintain the money piles and worldly powers of, the Western World. Every episode presents to us the rape and destruction of the traditional, organic, free-flowing cultures of the East (and their women and children............) and their replacement with human trafficking, prostitution, debauchery, sado-masochism, fake art/high art/carnival trash (Pascal), drug addiction, custom made ostentatious furnishings that give you a reason to never leave your home, the depravity and dehumanization prettily and colourfully wrapped but nevertheless destruction. Mona and all the Victims and all the Victimizers are sucked into a black vacuum, a black hole, the life sucked right out of them, which is what the sex-money-power-deviant driven West needs to get off, get high, and enjoy life. The West's deviant culture hidden away in a vacuum, its participants nameless and faceless, sucked lifeless by the vacuum the vacuum scene with Mona in that leather black costume........) Other scenes depicted the post-modern sex-money-power driven West destroying its own priceless treasure trove of Western civilization by making a mockery f greatly loved and immeasurably influential literature figures (Antigone, Oliver Twist, Pinocchio, The Little Prince, Katherina from Taming of the Shrew, Desdemona from Othello, etc: all of whom represent a facet of Mona's psyche and personality and worldview and all of whom represent a facet of the film's themes), whose literary struggles brought to the forefront of social/political/intellectual discourse the persecution and exploitation and dehumanization of women and children. The Joan of Arc room, heavily symbolic: nobody believed her and she was pounded in court by her questioners [just as Mona was pounded by men operating sex slave industry] and then burned to death, but not before being forced to recant her testimony just before the flesh-eating flames were ignited; the West [represented by the social worker] denied the underlying authenticity of Mona's experiences and forced her to recant her testimony and provide an "it's all my fault, I'm trash, I only have me to blame, the men who exploited me bear no responsibility for my demise" confession that psychology burns and destroys her in exchange for getting her daughter back.Additionally, Mona and Lilja both left the East to work in the West and both are forced into sexual slavery and both suffer the destruction of their identities and while both escape their experiences neither are recognizable as the woman and teenager they once were, one commits suicide and the other commits symbolic suicide (recantation of her experiences and denial that she was exploited sexually and economically).

and the main protagonist barely opens her mouth throughout the film

Films with minimal or no dialogue are not terrible nor uncommon or unheard of. Like many protagonists, Mona does open her mouth but not in the traditional sense (verbally articulated dialogue). She opens her eyes and mind to the viewers. We see the world through her eyes and mind. The cinematography and set designs and her child-like wide-eyed expressiveness are her dialogue: scenarios of dehumanization cinematized as fairy-tale stories, all intensely coloured with an ultra-professional glossy cosmopolitan sheen, beginning with light colours that continuously darken with each episode (the deeper we go into the underworld, the darker the world becomes, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west: the film begins in the east then moves to the west for the bulk of the film, returning to the east in the final minutes), elf green/apple green/lush lawn green to vistas of heraldic blues to velvety caramels and dripping taffy browns to thundering scarlet to sleek industrial jet black. The world as she sees it bright and vivid and fairy-tale like, everything glows, Mona is clear-sighted (which also symbolizes the underlying truthfulness of everything she experiences) and has hope in life despite everything. Which is perhaps a reference to Pascal's Wager - she lives her life as if she has everything to gain and nothing to lose, the matrix of free-flowing jazz lines that emerge throughout the film also represent her journey from east to west, the further into the into the Western underground she goes, the more abstracted and confused the musicality, representing the confusion of that lifestyle, of the West, of Mona's state of mind, of this world. The camera focuses on her eyes from beginning to end because behind her eyes is where the story unfolds, what's behind the eyes, the vacuum, the black hole, the curtains, the doors, the camera focus on her eyes asks those questions, no dialogue necessary.Every film is pretentious. Including documentaries. Saying a film is pretentious is like saying heavy metal music is loud.10/10

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