Post
by sauvin » Wed Nov 23, 2011 7:20 pm
I've been trying for two years to figure out precisely what it was about Eli and/or her relationship with Oskar compelled me so, and have so far failed. I'm beginning to believe it might be too subtle for me, or that it falls into Goedel's black space. Something similar is true of Abby, but to a much lesser extent, and this might be cultural blindness on my part: Eli and Oskar are Swedish, where Abby and Owen are very American.
Movie Eli's always seemed a bit "wooden" to me, very much the opposite of how novel Eli strikes me. In the novel, we get to see Eli getting a good belly laugh hooting something about bananas at the kiosk, leaving Oskar trying not to scream out laughing into his pillow. We see the kids in the basement playing knights and dragons. In fact, in the novel, they really are just kids who enjoy immensely spending time together. In the movie? More of a soap opera paced like a kind of balletic pavane. Eli doesn't ever come across as "chipper" to me, she's just too rigidly controlled and guarded most of the time.
Mind you, I'm talking about movie Eli. This isn't a criticism of LL's performance or of TA's direction. My presumption is that Eli's woodenness was deliberate, and it works because it gives much greater emphasis to the occasional tendernesses the kids share.
Abby wasn't wooden. Oppressed, maybe, and almost certainly dejected, but Abby doesn't come across as being so tightly wired. If anything, she's "slinkier", a lot more open in some ways. Open to possibility, but also more prone to being broadsided by twists of fate or the tides of change. I suppose the key scene making me say this is in the basement clubhouse when Owen tells her to close her eyes - she just stands there, facing Owen, eyes closed and a happily expectant smile on her face. She knows Owen knows she doesn't do well with candy, so she's not expecting Owen to pop a Now & Later into her mouth, so... what do you suppose she's anticipating?
I don't like Abby as well as I do Eli, and can't say why. Maybe it's just because she'd been there first, but I think it's faintly possible if I'd seen LMI first, I'd be saying much the same things I've been saying about Abby vs. Eli, but from the opposite perspective, liking Abby more than Eli and not being able to say why.
Fais tomber les barrières entre nous qui sommes tous des frères
) But I think for me the distance was great enough between this and the book that I could accept it as its own thing, while retaining the very basic ideas and plot structure of the book. My problem is that I expected too much of the LTROI film because of what's on this site and others, and it fell a little short for me. The book was just amazing in ways that may not even work on film at all. And LMI is visually a very beautiful film and very different from most American horror stories. So as an introductory piece, I think it works well, because if it leads you to the other two then you'll feel incredibly lucky to have gone in that direction. It probably wasn't best for me to read the book first in terms of being able to love the original film, but I am eternally glad to have gotten to read the book first and develop my own idea of the characters, since Lina and Kåre (and Per Ragnar I should say) are so... there's no other word for it, infectious 
