The second film from the Millenium Trilogy of novels by Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, like its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, hews closely to the plot line of the novel which spawned it. Without preamble, the life story of Lisbeth Salander continues where it left off, as she tries to navigate a world which damaged her to the point that she has difficulty relating to all humans. This film features the same cast in the lead roles as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but a change in the director and cinematographers has resulted in a film which lacks the icy sparkle and brittle atmosphere of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Still, those who thought the book was fun will probably also enjoy the film, despite its excessive violence and explicit sex.
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When Stieg Larsson died at the young age of fifty, he died without a will, creating a monstrous situation for his life companion, Eva Gabrielsson, with whom he lived for over thirty years and who worked with him on the first three novels in the Millenium Trilogy. Because Larsson died without a will, however, his whole estate went to his brother and his father. He lived with his grandparents when he was a child, he was never close to his father, and he had little or no contact with his brother. Long-time rumors of a partially completed fourth novel (thought to be on a laptop in Gabrielsson’s possession) are addressed in an article by Malin Rising for the Associated Press, widely distributed and available on a link provided here. One of Larssen’s long-time friends indicates that the 4th novel was supposed to take place on remote Banks Island in the Canadian Northwest Territories.
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First published in English in 1981, and republished in 2008, after the film “La Vie en Rose” created a whole new generation of passionate Piaf fans, Monique Lange’s biography of Piaf comes closer to capturing her personality and explaining her behavior than any other biography that I have read. An editor, writer, actress, and scriptwriter, Lange associated with some of the same Parisians who adored Piaf, especially Jean Cocteau, who persuaded Piaf to act in one of his plays. Though she does not indicate that she ever met Piaf, Lange seems to understand her and appreciate how she became who she was. Often sympathetic to Piaf’s problems, Lange never forgets that Piaf was just as often impossible to deal with–her own worst enemy. Writing in the conversational style of a feature article for a magazine or newspaper, Lange “gets inside” her characters, draws conclusions about Piaf’s life, and provides many pages of candid photographs.
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Every aspect of the film of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO works, and it is difficult to imagine any fan of the book being disappointed in this production. Danish director Niels Arden Oplev’s dark and atmospheric cinematography establishes an ice-cold mood from the outset, with the action taking place in winter on an isolated island where the sun never seems to shine. Michael Nyqvist (as Mikael Blomqvist) conveys the sense of loss, even betrayal, that his character feels after bringing legitimate charges against a powerful businessman and then losing the libel case. The vulnerability Nyqvist exudes makes him the perfect foil for Noomi Rapace (as Lizbeth Salander), who manages to convey not only the toughness and emotional dissociation resulting from the abuse she has faced, but also, in two memorable scenes, the feeling that behind the seemingly ironclad façade, there beats a real heart. Brilliant pacing keeps the action and the stunning surprises continuing throughout the film, and not a single “dead spot” appears, an extraordinary feat for a film that is more than two-and-a-half hours long and is depends upon subtitles for dialogue. Even people familiar with the book will be jolted out of their seats by the unexpected shocks as they hit.
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The film of GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is now out in selected areas of the US, and the DVD will be available on July 6. Links to video trailers for all three films of the Millenium Trilogy, already completed in Sweden, and are provided here with the full post.
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Middlemarch, originally published in eight separate volumes, is an enormous novel with a scope as epic as its length, often considered Eliot’s masterwork. While developing characters and complex romances, however, she also illustrates a variety of themes related to the social milieu of the early 1830s. Three or four main plots keep the reader enthralled for the nearly one thousand pages of this epic novel.
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The subtitle, “A Passionate Life,” epitomizes everything Edith Piaf believed in and stood for. Perhaps because of her impoverished childhood, in which even a small kindness meant everything, Piaf grew up craving attention and love. Abandoned by her mother, she grew up in Pigalle, doing whatever she could to stay alive and find happiness, however fleeting. If that meant doing a quick trick to get enough money to eat, she did that. If she could get enough money singing on a corner, she did that instead. Uneducated and unloved, she developed few, if any, inner resources, intellectually or emotionally, to deal with the fame that was to become her fate, and with her need for love, she was fair game for every manipulator, sleazy operator, and parasite who came her way. Marcel Cerdan, the love of Piaf’s life, as we see in the film, LA VIE EN ROSE, is just a small part of the story here. This book contains a full discography with detailed information about her song-writers.
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Don’t plan to see this film and then go out for a lively night on the town. You will be so spent after the one hundred forty-one minutes of this gut-wrenching film that when the lights come on at the end, you’ll need a minute to figure out where you are, and then additional downtime to process all you’ve seen. Piaf’s story is well known to her long-time fans–brought up in a brothel, wrested from the only life she knew by her father so they could join the circus, her teen years on the streets, her “rescue” by a crime figure who gave her the start to her career, and, ultimately, her international success and final illness. She was always frail, sickly, malnourished, and wildly temperamental. She was often on drugs or alcohol, and she was always in search of true love (not finding it till late in her life). All this is depicted here with its horrors and its rare moments of tenderness, the cinematography (Tetsuo Nagata) so brilliant that the realistic, dark settings invite the reader’s emotional entry into them and exploration of them.
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