Which other actors would make a great Eli?

[sauvin]

In other topics, we've proposed the conjecture that Eli deliberately neglects personal hygiene as part of an attempt to keep Hakan at arm's length.

Perhaps, but if so it clearly wasn't working.

I dunno. The old goat seemed to get a little randier when novel Eli stepped out of the shower, didn't he? And if she had been deliberately neglecting personal hygiene so that her natural aroma could help put him off, then why precisely did she suddenly decide to shower? I don't remember the novel well, but wasn't this shortly after Oskar had said something about her being a bit fragrant? And wasn't Eli about to set off on another hunt? In either event, nobody told her to shower, she took it on her own, and it seems to indicate that she's very well aware that being all clean and scrubbed up can help with a Jocke-type attack: reel 'em in close before biting.

In the dead of winter, who can smell anything when the nose is half-frozen and full of dripping gunk?

Oskar did.

And maybe here the fact that I've been a lifelong smoker means I don't have a clear sense of how acute is the human sense of smell. Mine is largely gone. Still, it's much easier to smell rotting garbage in subtropical summer than it is in subarctic winter, isn't it? Goodness knows how Oskar smelled anything in the Swedish winter night when he was a few feet away from her, especially in view of the fact that his nose tended to drip a lot in various places around the movie.

Women might rush off to the aid fo little boys and girls equally who appear to be distressed, but one rather suspects men are more commonly found out and about after the sun sets, and men will rush off to help a little girl much more readily.

All true*, but given Eli's levels of cluelessness regarding clothes (not realising that putting on blood-soaked clothing might be a social faux pas, being oblivious to how walking barefoot on the snow will look, etc), the argument for this being Eli's motivation is weak, and in any case inapplicable to the specific circumstances of choosing Yvonne's dress.

Not realising, or not thinking? She didn't want to take anything from Oskar, that seems clear enough, and so her first thought may very well have been just to work with the resources she had that actually belonged to her. She claims she took the dress because it looked the most worn, and I still think she meant this at face value, and still succeeded in taking nothing away from Oskar himself, but from his mother who presumably didn't mean nearly as much to her.

And if this is the case, one presumes Mom had an assortment of clothes in the wardrobe, including things like pant suits, gown-like things, and for all of me, mini skirts. If she wasn't going to take something of Oskar's, she was going to have to choose something that she could keep on her body without a lot of effort - keeping a fully grown woman's pants on would be annoying, especially if they didn't have any belt loops, for example. A simple summer dress wouldn't be too long (she wouldn't be tripping over it) and it could just hang from her shoulders.

I still think her notion of gender roles is empirical, and she's learned from experience something very similar to what's quoted below, that girls can get help more easily than boys.

She's not going to have kids, grow up and get married

In my interpretation, it's not about any of that. It's not even about gender at all, which is why I don't see any contradiction between saying Eli didn't take something of Oskar's because they're a boy's clothes while saying that book Eli has a boyish personality.

No, no conflict. It really isn't about gender, not for her, at least, not in the novel. The only real effect wearing a summer dress in the dead of winter had was just to make Tommy think she was really strange. Maybe JAL chucked a dress on Eli just to confuse us a bit.

In the movie, this is the third or fourth time Eli is seen all cleaned up, and the third time she's seen smiling. Elina on jungle gym, smelling all better and being a cute little girl, d'aww, Elina in the basement asking what Oskar would like to do, playing music and looking mildly amused, d'aww, Elina knocking on Oskar's door looking like the poster child for the Girl Scouts, d'aww, and now, Elina in a dress doing a cute little curtsy and twirl, double-d'aww because this is the first time her small stature is so readily apparent in a fully grown woman's dress. None of this answers to Eli's motivations (especially since Oskar had specifically told her she could borrow something from his mother), but most definitely has an effect on how we see her, which is very likely part of the point.

*In fact, the other day while walking past a park with a female colleague, our reactions to a boy falling off his bike (some bleeding, no serious harm) illustrate your point very well. My reaction was very pragmatic ("nothing useful I can do" - I tried giving him a clean tissue for the bleeding but he didn't take it) while my colleague insisted on walking him home, though his dad was there (the dad was pretty angry at the boy, actually). Had it been a girl my reaction would've probably been more emotional while I would probably also been more wary of getting involved - I can't justify the former, only explain it. In a similar, but more humorous vein, a male friend once jokingly told a female who had twisted her ankle "Sea macha y aguántese" which roughly translates to "Take it like a man."