It’s gratifying that, in the week that Twilight was
about to demonstrate the ease with which our degraded popular
culture is able to assimilate a ludicrously sanitized version of
vampirism — Stephenie Meyer’s vampires normally drink only
animal blood, and not that of endangered species — to the sexual
fantasies of teenage girls, I was able to see Let the Right
One In (Lat den rätte komma in) by the Swedish
director, Tomas Alfredson. This movie is also a fantasy but not,
at least until the end, a childish, wish-fulfilling one. On the
contrary, it almost succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of
coaxing a flame of originality and even profundity from the cold,
dead ashes of the vampire legend. He does this by doing a
sex-change on the central fantasy figure transferring her from
the realm of Gothic sex imagery — gone camp for two generations
now —- to the enchanted but already semi-sexualized world of
pre-pubescence.
His vampire, Eli (Lina Leandersson), is an ethereally-beautiful
child who is half Lolita, half Peter Pan. She befriends the
lonely, epicene Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) who is the victim of
bullies at school and an often-absent single-mother at home. We
would be disposed to believe that Eli, with her combination of
beauty and power, was a figment of his imagination were it not
for Hakan (Per Ragnar), her strange companion who murders and
drains the blood from random victims — human, not animal — in
order to feed her. He is one of the film’s better ideas. We don’t
know what his relations to Eli is, and he doesn’t appear to be a
vampire himself. But for whatever reason he has taken it upon
himself to adopt a parental role towards her, going out to do
difficult and dangerous work in order that she may be protected
and nourished.
The trouble is that, he does it so badly, on more than one
occasion nearly getting caught in the midst of his halal-style
butcheries of the neighbors and leaving her to do the more
traditional vampire thing of fastening her teeth into people’s
necks and drinking their blood fresh from the source. Even
vampires, it seems, can have feckless or incompetent parents and
providers and so be forced to make their own way in the world.
The mock, two-person family made up by Eli and Hakan mirrors that
of Oskar and his mother, Yvonne (Karin Bergquist), in the
neighboring apartment of their featureless, down-market building,
except that the balance of affection and fear — of the would-be
child in the would-be parent — is somewhat exaggerated in the
former. Also, of course, the child in that case can never grow
up.
“Are you dead?” Oskar asks when he realizes, about three quarters
of the way through the film, what his new friend really is.
“No,” she replies. “Can’t you tell?”
“But are you old?”
“I’m twelve. But I’ve been twelve for a long time.”
The point about J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, as P.J. Hogan recognized
in his fine
film of 2003, was that he was a boy. There is both
good and bad about never growing up, but it is only, really, an
option for boys. Not the least fantastical element of “The
Twilight Saga” is the typical pop-cultural pretense that girls
are just the same. Wendy is there to remind us that girls are not
the same, that they are biologically programmed to get on with
life in a way that boys are not, and that this fact of nature was
always destined to put an end to the Neverland idyll. Eli, as she
keeps insisting to Oskar, is not a real girl. Oskar says he
doesn’t care. He wants her to “go steady” with him anyway, but
the fact that he will grow and she won’t would seem to put the
same sort of unbridgeable gulf between them as exists between
Wendy and Peter. “Just so you know, I can’t be your friend,” is
the first thing Eli says to Oskar — though thereafter Mr
Alfredson seems intent on denying this.
Is that because he means to suggest to us an allegory of what
Pope Jean-Paul II used to call “the culture of death” or — and
the two are very far from being mutually exclusive — a gloss on
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 (“They that have power to hurt and will
do none”)? It says something for the film that the question even
arises, but I’m afraid that’s not where he’s going with it. For
much of the movie, he does a marvelous job of capturing the
child’s sense of a permeable membrane separating reality and
enchantment, and, at least for so long as this is sustained —
for so long as vampirism is a secret shared by the two childish
friends, like how to solve the Rubik’s cube — it is the best
thing about the movie. I also like the fact that Eli, in spite of
her otherworldly origins and interests, has enough of a sense of
ordinary, down-to-earth moral difficulties and dilemmas — what
should the undead have to do with schoolboy honor, anyway? — to
give Oskar some good advice about how to deal with the trio of
bullies.
But, finally, Let the Right One In cannot escape from
vampire camp and the wish-fulfilling likes of Twilight.
The final revenge fantasy is too obvious, vulgar and Stephen
Kingish, in my view spoiling much of what has gone before. Up
until then, the unhappy home and school life of the hero is
hinted at without being insisted upon or made too much of, and
his retreat into a private world comes to seem natural and right.
Likewise some of the more spectacular effects, by becoming too
explicit, too much given to typical “horror” movie fare, break
the illusion so painfully built up with music and painterly
camera-work and the fine performances of the two children in the
film’s best passages. This is a movie that could almost have been
an apology for fantasy, if the fantasy did not end up being too
trite and familiar and, like most fantasy, frankly unbelievable.
