Rapace before Salander

Now officially obsessed, digging around this weekend for something new on the Noomi Rapace, I came across this unsettling frame grab of the “Dragon Tattoo” actress from the Norwegian film ”Daisy Diamond”, made two years earlier, in which she plays a young single mother desperate to launch an acting career. (Safe bet: some enterprising indie distributer in the US already has this in his sights.)

Rapace's performance as Lisbeth Salander is great especially in its sidelong details; a glance here, an inflection there. Which are pretty much all Rapace has to work with, given the conception of the character. As the series continues, a few glimmers of emotion begin to leak out through the chinks in her defensive carapace, Salander’s microscopic double-takes at acts of spontaneous kindness. There’s a perfect example in the third film, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” when she reacts with the tiniest of flinching movements, as if she’s been slugged by a fly, at the significance of the pizza that’s turned up in her hospital room. She’d mentioned her craving to an attentive young doctor, and now here it is. (He also has the sensitivity not to bring it to her in person.)

The good guys in this story -- Blomqvist, the doctor, security boss Dragon Aramansky – are the people who see through Salander’s defenses yet chose to respect them. Who admire them. Larsson seems to have thought of himself as a radical, but the notion of courage he endorses is foursquare: A hero is a very different creature from a blockhead who’s too stupid to be afraid.