Larsson's brutal scenes are of a piece with his theme and his heroine.
This is the year of Stieg Larsson. In The Girl Who Played With Fire -
Film II of Book II of Larsson's wildly successful and complex series on
contemporary corruption, Swedish style - the characters we met in The Girl
With the Dragon Tattoo are back where they belong, but all is not right with
their world. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is again roaming under deep cover,
this time to clear herself of a murder charge filed when her fingerprints were
found on a murder weapon. Mikael Blomkvist, investigative journalist and editor
of Millennium Magazine is trying to uncover the identities of the principals in
a Russian/Swedish prostitution ring. His newly hired investigator has been
murdered. It was on that murder weapon that Salander's fingerprints were found.
Blomkvist
doesn't need proof of Salander's innocence. She long ago proved to him her
honesty, and he knows that she is driven by a hatred of men's violence against
women - a drive she came by at the hands of a horrific father who brutalized
both mother and daughter.
Early on, Salander visits her former guardian (Per Oscarsson), a fine man and
protector who was felled by a stroke. Salander's slight smile and tender
treatment of the old man soften the audience for the violence she will mete out
to deserving misogynists as they cross her path. We welcome each shift back to
the offices of Millennium where Erika Berger (Lena Andre) , Blomkvist's
colleague and part time lover, offers safe haven to him and to the audience.
As opposed to
the gratuitous violence so common these days, Larsson's brutal scenes are of a
piece with his theme and his heroine. The damaged girl, finding no help from the
police, knows that she alone can prove her innocence. Her rage at the men in her
past who objectify women with hatred and disgust fuels her actions as she
burrows into the prostitution scandal that infects Stockholm's elite. This
violence is entirely personal, and it might have taken a different course if
anyone in power had seen fit to expose the corruption among the powerful. That
task falls to Millennium and it's editor Mikael Blomkvist who takes it on with
Salander's eccentric help. Theirs is a relationship built on unwavering long
distance trust.
The word is
out that Hollywood is remaking the Larsson series. They face formidable problems
in writing a screenplay for English speaking actors in a story that is Swedish
to its very bones. Noomi Rapace suffers more on screen indignity than most
actresses do in a whole career, and yet because she is slight and says so
little, we are surprised at the strength of her emotions and her physical
agility. Her Lisbeth Salander is alone in the world except for that deeply
honest connection with Mikael Blomkvist. Beware, Hollywood, when casting those
two parts that seem wholly owned by Noomi Rapace and Mikael Blomkvist. There's
little room for improvement.
Copyright (c) Illusion