Elina Lowensöhn
(1966-present) Actress

Elina Lowensöhn

Elina Lowensöhn in South of Heaven

Elina Lowensöhn is the thinking man’s Greta Garbo. You can’t take your eyes off her when she is on the screen, no matter how hard you try. Why is that? No one knows the secret of these things. She and the quirky independent film director Hal Hartley were made for each other. It is impossible to imagine the films of Hal Hartley without Elina having been in some of them, and impossible to imagine her having lived without having ever been directed by Hal Hartley. Hal Hartley’s films are like enacted dreams. Certainly they must happen to him at night and then he goes and makes them. Elina is a dream-creature, she is not real. She cannot possibly be real. How can anybody be like that? Her weird accent, - there is nothing like it in the world. Even though she likes to say in her films: ‘I am a Romanian’, it is not enough. No Romanian sounds like that. Not even Transylvanian vampires, such as the one she played in Nadja, sound like that. She is also the Queen of Deadpan. She is one of greatest comediennes of the screen, without ever having cracked a joke. What line could be more hilarious than: ‘I really want to change my life,’ delivered with an earnest deadpan seriousness, like a kid chatting to friends at university, when she is really a world-weary vampire living in Manhattan, who is getting sick of sucking everybody’s blood and wants to turn over a new leaf and go straight. She wants to give up blood like somebody who wants to give up smoking. It is too hysterically funny for words. No other actress could get away with that. She is too subtle and sophisticated for main stream films. The mob would not ‘get it’. Everything she says is spoken with the droll insouciance of an inside joke, and usually it is one. She is only beautiful in the strangest possible way, not in any ordinary way. She does not exude sexuality, and one gets the impression she does not want to be wanted, barely notices men, and prefers to be something unique, one is not sure what. The mystery deepens. This requires more thought.

Amateur, starring Elina Lowensöhn

Nadja, starring Elina Lowensöhn