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Directed by Daniel Alfredson
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The Girl Who Played With Fire
The
second in the trilogy of films made from Stieg
Larsson’s novels, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” is first
of all faithful to Larsson’s writing and his plot line. It has the same cast as the first
film, but where it falls down is in the direction – this time by Daniel
Alfredson.
His style is clunky, he has little sense of camera placement, and
worst of all he has his heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), wearing some kind of pancake makeup on her face
so that all the marvelous bone structure of Rapace’s
face, the interesting planes of it, are completely lost. Moreover, Alfredson’s
direction makes her look like any of a dozen leading actresses. And just so you’ll know where
I’m coming from, he can’t edit properly either; he holds on
dialogue long past the point he wants to make, and fills the screen with
static shots of Michael Nyqvist (he plays the male
lead, Mikael Blomqvist)
that don’t go anywhere. Can
I say anything more about the direction?
I think not. What I can
say, though, is that the story line, as invented by Larsson and scripted for
the film by Jonas Frykberg, is still superb. “The Girl Who Played With
Fire” was the very best of the trilogy, short and without a wasted
moment. Although the film might
be shorter by twenty minutes if only Alfredson
would get out of the way of the story, the running time (129 minutes) does
not feel too long. What does feel too long is Blomqvist’s
slow reactions to events. For
example, at one crucial moment we’ve seen him driving with his cellphone, then arriving at the
scene of a wounded person.
Instead of calling in an emergency, Alfredson
simply holds – and holds – on the shot. Even a first-year film student would
know better. Noomi Rapace, who was so incredible as Lisbeth Salander in the first film, seems to be flattened out
here – again by Alfredson. Her face is flat, her movements too
deliberate to be believable, and something that was in the novel and should
have been in the film, is her strange and moving relationship with another
computer hacker, who helps her out without ever meeting her when she needs
it. |