India bans The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Daniel Craig’s Enya dies horribly
THE anal rape scene in the Hollywood remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo means the film will not be screened in India. You’d suppose all those frescos and carvings of sex and buggery would make the Indians au fait with sodomy. It wasn’t just the rape India’s Central Board of Film Certification wanted chopped and changed , it was all the sex scenes, of which there at least three. Director David Fincher was noncompliant and refused to make the changes.
Sony Pictures India says:
The Censor Board has adjudged the film unsuitable for public viewing in its unaltered form and, while we are committed to maintaining and protecting the vision of the director, we will, as always, respect the guidelines set by the Board.
Lisbeth Salander is a fantastic character. Dark. An outsider abused by those on the inside. A face that says “f*ck off”. And she’s utterly likeable for it.
Stieg Larssen’s story of misogynistic violence is a hit, partly because the writer is dead. Stieg Larsson is posthumous- the reader is untrammelled by any celebrity foisted upon the author. Would he have licked this latest film of his book? Dunno. The film is very good, but those sex scenes are bit, well, too sexy – too Hollywood. When Salandar is raped for the first time by her probation officer, she comes across as too compliant.
To her side, Daniel Craig plays a man who is Lisbeth’s inferior – he fails to nail a living crook but is hired to find a dead girl. What odds on his success? Craig’s character, Mikael Blomkvist, is given a sexiness not overly apparent in the book. When he pours two vodkas into glass with a single turn of the wrist, you see more of James Bond than the journalist on his uppers.
One part of the film the Indian censors should ask Fincher to change is when Craig’s being tortured by Stellan Skarsgard’s Martin Vanger. The killer plays Enya’s Orinoco Flow. This was one at Craig’s suggestion. Why? Well, the actor says it was on his iPod. If Craig wanted to distance himself from his ubercool Bond, he’s just done it. Enya… Now that is terrifying…
[Image via AP]
Posted: 29th, January 2012 | In: Film Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
