LISBETH SALANDER: IMAGE ON THE SCREEN
Friday was Stieg Larsson day in Sweden and Denmark as the movie based on the first book in the Millennium trilogy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was released. [Information from The Local Sweden's News in English full article here].
You can read my previous posts which discuss the Stieg Larsson and Lisbeth Salander phenomenon here.
The article comments that "some critics have said virtually unknown actress Noomi Rapace .......is physically too big and muscular to faithfully play Salander, described in the trilogy as a small androgynous girl who is so skinny she looks anorexic.......But most viewers of the nearly two and half hour film said physical differences were forgotten thanks to Rapace's convincing performance."
Some authors never describe their protagonists to avoid the problem of readers not identifying with the character in any television or movie adaptation. Others have a very clear idea of what the hero or heroine looks like and describe them in detail. Stieg Larsson was one of the later type and described Salander as anorexic, 124-150 cm tall, 40 kgm in weight and although she was 26 looking like a 14 year old. It is a tragedy that we can't ask the author what he thinks about the casting of the movie, but I shall look forward to the sub-titled version with great anticipation to see how an actress who bears very little resemblance to the Lisbeth Salander I imagined comes across on the screen.
posted by Uriah Robinson at 11:37 AM
8 Comments:
Great the film is doing so well. Films rarely if ever live up to the books, I think one just has to "divorce" the two in one's mind. I remember being very shocked as a girl when I went to see Far from the Madding Crowd and Bathsheba (Julie Christie) had blonde hair! The horror! It almost ruined the film (otherwise quite true to the book, though with a couple of other fairly minor plot deviations) for me. I realised then that film and book are never going to gel, because books are so personal, and films so general.
I have all the visual imagination of a wet sock (seriously - everything is words for me, and I've never really been able to imagine what characters look like), so things like that never bother me. I've found this a major advanage in watching filmed books over the years. The down side is that plot and dialogue changes tend to annoy me unreasonably, since I've got the text floating around in my head rather than any images.
Hey Uriah, check my blog tomorrow and see the article about Stieg's niece, on whom he partly modeled Salander. I'll try to translate it tonight -- pic included!
Look forward to that Reg especially the pic.
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Based on the number of hits I have had today on this post about Lisbeth Salander there is tremendous interest in the trilogy and the movie. This is a tribute to the author and the translator, but perhaps something is owed to Stieg's niece and Astrid Lindgren as well for the inspiration.
Just finished reading the book, a gift from my wife. Agreed on the commment above about Noomi Rapace. She's gorgeous, but almost ruins the film for me. . . .they should've used Stine Fischer Christensen instead (saw her recently in "Ekko" - which has the same mood as this film, oddly enough)
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