The Impact of Choosing Less Beautiful Leads for LTROI

[intrige]

That's a great animation. Thanks for posting. I love some of the English subs. "It's also a nice rack?"

I did the subtitle, yeah I can't even recall the mistakes I did, because it was so long ago. Fintrist, is what she says, which means, nicesad, in a way. But when I traslated it on google transelate to make sure something else showed up Well I only transelated tha word, the rest of it I could actually work out myslef. It's so lang ago and I was not as good in english as I am today

[sauvin]

I'd like to propose a thought experiment.

We have Lina Leandersson playing Eli, and Kare Hedebrant (sp?) playing Oskar, Neither child is "ugly" by any means, but they're not stunningly beautiful, either. Honestly, they're just regular kids, and I believe if you were to look around wherever you might find large numbers of children, you'll find largish numbers who could match or exceed either child in beauty by whatever metric we might choose to apply.

We've gone on for a couple of years, some of us, talking about how this kind of lighting had that kind of emotional effect, or how that particular musical arrangement dovetailed so "perfectly" with this particular scene... in fact I think just about the only thing we haven't touched upon were the various actors' manicures. Locations, times of day for filming, colour schemes for the characters' various attires, on and on and on, and what we've somehow wound up with is praising an amazingly detail-oriented Alfredson who weaved together all these minutiae into an almost seamlessly composite whole that twinges our nerves subtly here and bangs on them hard there.

The actors' appearance isn't an important detail to how the movie impacted us?

It's true that the kids turned in stellar performances. It's obvious they have talent in this area, and it's just as obvious they've had wonderful direction. If they couldn't have acted any better than the kids in the school play just a couple blocks down the street, it's more than possible the movie would never have crossed American borders; it'd have been an dead unsalvageable dud.

So, the thought experiment is this: let's let Eli have braces.

Sheah, right, huh? Braces on a vampire? On a vampire two centuries old, who last had a meal shepherd's pie or slow-cooked beef stew in her little backwater far north Swedish dorf about the same time that orthodontics of this sort were only just starting development weeks' worth of travel further south in France? Kinda stretches our admittedly elastic capacity for suspension of disbelief a bit, doesn't it? But what's worse, even if you don't mind a glaring anachronism, even if her teeth had been fitted with dental braces of some sort while she was still "human", wouldn't they have corroded or decomposed and fallen away decades ago?

The braces, in other words, would have been a distraction. Something similar would be true of broken and crooked noses, scars, acne, missing body parts, Day-Glo hair and ears festooned with satellite antennae.

OK, so, braces don't work. My feeling is that movie Eli needed to be a relatively plain and unremarkable young lady. She couldn't be a Dakota Fanning running around in little more than body paint, and she couldn't be Quasimodo if she was to persuade us of what we know from the novel: lonely, withdrawn, reserved - something "other". She had to be neighbour's daughter or the girl running up and down the street trying to sell you Girl Scout cookies.

Let's take up another thought experiment: let's let Eli really look like she's 20, with a Megan Fox kind of beauty, and let her stand about six feet tall. Let's let Oskar still look to be about twelve, but let him stand about a head and a half shorter than her. Let's also let him have a rip-roaring case of pizza face acne, little piggy eyes, a real shrill squeaky kind of little girl voice, and let's let him have a few thousand plates of lasagna too many hanging over his belt. Let's let these transmogrified kids turn in precisely the same performances we saw.

Would the movie have had the same impact on us? I don't think so. Couldn't you just hear the tens of thousands of yodeling drooling sixpacks at IMDB howling she's an opportunistic predator in more than one way, that she's not just a vampire, she's also a cougar?

We could think up all kinds of other logical extremes, too, and come up with similar probable effects. Suppose instead that somebody like Dakota Fanning or Jodelle Ferland (Silent Hill) had played Eli? These actresses could have turned in a convincing Eli, I'm sure of it, but there would still be differences in how the movie would have come across. Subtle differences, maybe, but differences just the same.

Abby sure isn't Eli, is she?

The degree of the difference depends on the degree of the extremity.

There's some pretty obvious and broad subtext going on here. With Eli's appearance, she's not obviously evil, and she's not obviously some beaten and abused refugee from a broken home with a sign on her forehead saying "I'm a victim! Hit me!" You've seen such girls - we all have. She comes across as exactly what I gather she's meant to be: a perfectly ordinary, normal everyday little girl who's been utterly broadsided by a monstrous evil. She herself might be criminal, she might even be a crime, but she is ultimately the product of one of the worst kinds of crime, and curiously innocent because of it.

Something similar is true of movie Oskar. He's not fat, and he's not too skinny (for his age, place and time). He's tall, but not enough to really stand out. He's not dorky, not stuttering, not slow-witted. He's not only not a foreigner, he's not even from the other side of the railroad tracks! He, too, is just a perfectly ordinary, normal everyday little boy.

So, why is he being bullied? It just doesn't seem fair, does it?

If Oskar were a sawed-off little runt with a sausage-and-anchovies face, porcine eyes and the voice of a miniature oboe, watching him being bullied wouldn't seem quite so out of place. We could tell ourselves, "No, it isn't fair what's happening to him, but, well, I mean just look at him. Is it any wonder?" Somebody in this forum a few months ago made some Darwinian comment about teasing and bullying and suchlike being some kind of social winnowing mechanism ("and if you don't like it, too [HONK]ing bad!"), and such a theory is consonant with the experiences many of us had actually had as children. There's a darkness in us that has many names and many faces that causes us to sympathise to varying degrees with the bullies who are so misguidedly and clumsily championing the cause of keeping the gene pool strong and deep.

But movie Oskar is what he is. He's every child who's run home more than once crying because the other kids had been mean. He's every little boy or girl who don't understand Darwinian thinking in such matters, who doesn't see him- or herself as being markedly enough different to merit such treatment. He's too young to understand that what doesn't kill him just makes him stronger, and that inability to understand puts him (well, Oskar, at any rate) on an express train to alienation, dark fantasy and an ability to turn his back on humanity utterly.

What's happening to him, in other words, iswrong. It just shouldn't be. Maybe we could "almost" understand it if he were Obscene Blubbery Oskar, but what's being assaulted here is visually something just a few zip codes south of Apollonian. I believe this, too, is one of the many subtle elements woven into the Swedish LTROI chef d'oeuvre: light being assaulted on one side by one kind of darkness, and slowly seduced by another on another.

And, he is us, and we are he: innocent victims of circumstance, bewildered and wondering "c'est precisement quoi, tout ce bordel...!?"

[Marlow]

Well, let me be the first to offer the manicure observation: Eli has blood under hers and Oskar has a remarkably well manicured fingernails for any twelve-year-old. You would think he would have bitten them to the quick in anxiety given a knock on the door is a cause for concern for him. He does have a small cut on a finger that can be seen on a knuckle. Bad knife handling skills?
Imagine the director," Okay, you are carrying a knife and are going to stab a tree: don't trip and don't stab yourself!" I wonder if there were child welfare workers on the set? "Yeah, these twelve-year-olds are going to be running around at -10C with knives." What sort of insurance did this movie have?
All the above in jest, except Kare did have really well manicured nails!

[mackousko]

...

As to the impact of the story on me. I really don´t care how they look. Even if they would look extremely unusual. If their personalities are the same means for me the story is the same.

[a_contemplative_life]

I realized tonight that I never answered my own post.

I'm inclined to agree with those who suggest that using unattractive (or even downright "ugly") leads would probably have detracted somewhat from the telling of the story, and perhaps might even have amounted to a major distraction.

I would disagree with those of you who venture to state that Lina's and Oskar's looks are of ordinary attractiveness. Of course, subjectivity cannot be avoided here, but still...let's not downplay the obvious.





Finally, I do think there is something about this film and its story that tends to attract the attention of people who struggle with finding their own self-identity. Whether this is because they have been abused, neglected, ostracized, or bullied, I don't think matters...they are pulled in to the promise of true love that lies at the dark, yet somehow brilliant, heart of LTROI.

[jetboy]

I would like to bring up another reason why attractive kids were used to effectiveness. To me LTROI is a symbolic movie in so many ways. Yes Oskar is Oskar and Eli is Eli but they also stand for something in a symbolic way. To me they stand for youth. In so many ways, youth, before a person changes in reaction to their environment is a persons true self and if they are representing a persons true self, they should be beautiful.

[metoo]

… We have Lina Leandersson playing Eli, and Kare Hedebrant (sp?) playing Oskar, Neither child is "ugly" by any means, but they're not stunningly beautiful, either. Honestly, they're just regular kids, and I believe if you were to look around wherever you might find large numbers of children, you'll find largish numbers who could match or exceed either child in beauty by whatever metric we might choose to apply. …

I agree, Lina and Kåre were regular kids, look-wise. It seems to me that the praise of their appearances in this thread is somewhat out of proportion. But the story is beautiful, the cinematography and music score as well, and their acting superb. Maybe this colours the perception of how they look?

[SFTifoso]

I agree, Lina and Kare are just your average kids. They could make a 3rd movie, and I would still fall in love with those characters no matter who they are.

PS Speaking of a third movie, if I was a billionaire I would make a 3rd, 10 hour movie, that follows the book religiously.

[shaggles]

I agree, Lina and Kare are just your average kids. They could make a 3rd movie, and I would still fall in love with those characters no matter who they are.

PS Speaking of a third movie, if I was a billionaire I would make a 3rd, 10 hour movie, that follows the book religiously.

Or you could hire the cast of the movie to come over to your billionaire mansion and act out scenes from the book.

[SFTifoso]

I agree, Lina and Kare are just your average kids. They could make a 3rd movie, and I would still fall in love with those characters no matter who they are.

PS Speaking of a third movie, if I was a billionaire I would make a 3rd, 10 hour movie, that follows the book religiously.

Or you could hire the cast of the movie to come over to your billionaire mansion and act out scenes from the book.

And I would fly you all in to watch.