Let Me In, the American remake of the 2008 Swedish film, Let the Right One In, in turn based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, illustrates the perils of transplanting a story from one social context into another. The original dealt with a 12-year-old boy, bullied at school, discovering that the girl next door, also 12, but in fact stuck at that age for all eternity, is a vampire. The relationship has no socially acceptable future. The girl needs blood to survive and she has an adult lover, with whom she cannot make love, who is prepared to kill for her. The love that she inspires can never be fulfilled, yet this is presented as pure, borne out of abstinence – but at a cost.
To accept the story, you have to believe in a culture that venerates eternal abstinence. But, as David Bowie once sung, this is not America. Matt Reeves, who directed the film and adapted the original screenplay, has done his best to find an equivalent of the original setting, relocating the action to a wintry Los Alamos in 1983. Crucially, though, the male lead is not a credible character. The boy, renamed Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is raised by his religious single mother and doesn’t have any friends. This is hard to believe – to have no friends whatsoever you have to either shun company or be found to be objectionable. Neither alternative is suggested here.
The girl-woman, Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz) is far more believable. She tells Owen early on: “We cannot be friends”, but nevertheless is drawn to him out of an aching sense of loneliness. Her companion (Richard Jenkins), whom Owen mistakenly refers to her father, is getting too old to be an efficient serial killer. However, in both versions, a central question goes unanswered: why should Abby preserve her own immortality?
The key set pieces of the 2008 movie – the botched early murder, the bullying sequences and the violent swimming pool climax – are recreated faithfully and, in the case of the latter sequence, shot for shot. However, fidelity is not enough. You have to believe in the inevitability of the final scene, that Owen could only live in a world where a vampire is his lover; that he would want to take care of her as she had saved him. But I didn’t.
Tonally, the film veers from an art-house horror flick complete with a homage to Rear Window – Owen spies on his neighbours through a telescope – to something much cruder, in particular when one of Abby’s victims spontaneously combusts in a hospital bed. I could not fault the performances, but Let Me In is only a respectful remake rather than a good one.
As I watched Africa United, about two Rwandan boys, middle-class Fabrice (Roger Nsengiyumva) and his street kid pal and self-styled “manager” Dudu (Eriya Ndayambaje) making their way to Soccer City in South Africa in time for the opening of the 2010 World Cup, accumulating three friends along the way, I wondered why the filmmakers thought audiences would be interested three months after the competition ended.
Certainly, the British-based filmmakers, writer Rhidian Brook and director Debs Gardner-Paterson want to educate the audience about African issues. During their 3,000-mile journey, Fabrice and Dudu encounter civil war, child soldiers, AIDS, the devaluation of national currency, wildlife preserves, alcohol and prostitution. Conveniently, when they get stuck, there is a United Nations Office or adequately equipped hospital to help them out. Are Brook and Gardner-Paterson justifying international aid?
I have little doubt that the African diaspora would find the film patronising. It actually suggests that there are just two career options for Africans looking to make a difference. Worse, they are along gender lines – medicine for girls and football for boys. So the makers propose a justification for the West robbing Africa of these two skilled practitioners. The film intersperses their month-long journey with animated interludes as Dudu tells the story of the construction of a ball that will never burst, a metaphor for African resilience. But towards what?
Clearly, the makers have designed the film to shown in schools, so the inevitable box-office failure isn’t the end of the film’s life. Audiences would have been better served by a more culturally specific story in which the triumph is less of a metaphor. There is no doubt that the first African World Cup did cause unifying support for African teams that played against Europe and the Americas. However, this did not translate into political unity – how could it? The ending is genuinely confusing: supposedly heart warming, yet the most likeable character appears to die. What else does the final shot of him standing at the entrance to the stadium, briefcase in hand, while the film fades to white mean? This is also a film where the cinematic language– including a Western pop soundtrack that includes “That’s Not My Name” by The Ting Tings – is questionable. Come on – fade to white?
