H In troubled waters
But the imperfect female finally takes the lead
APPY 2015, TV watchers. I hope you had a good festive season — or as I call it, “the season where I wake up, observe the fine weather, and immediately draw the curtains to watch box-sets”.
Father Christmas brought me a treat in the form of 2007 Scandinavian crime series The Bridge, or Bron/Broen , as it’s known in either Swedish or Danish. There’s a reason why American producers took one look at the show and decided to remake it: it’s compulsively watchable, particularly if you have a taste for Scandi noir.
When European TV shows are given the American treatment, the result is sometimes quite different but equally good ( The Office, I’d argue), and sometimes chillingly bad (anyone recall when Fawlty Towers was overhauled in the US as the aptly-named Payne ?). I haven’t seen the American adaptation of The Bridge , which is currently showing on DStv Catch-Up, but critical consensus seems to be that it was almost as good as — and very similar to — the Scandinavian original.
The Bridge opens with a body found exactly halfway along the 16km bridge which separates Sweden from Denmark. Due to the location of the corpse, Danish and Swedish police officers must work together to solve the crime. The American adaptation transplants the body to the border between the US and Mexico — possibly a more promising location, due to the more dramatic political tensions at play.
Scandi crime thrillers are two-a-penny these days. What gives The Bridge the edge is its memorable main character: a Swedish policewoman called Saga Noren (Sofia Helin). Saga rocks flowing blonde hair, a scarred top lip, leather pants, and a vintage Porsche.
But she also appears to be on the autistic spectrum, although a diagnosis is never explicitly spelled out. She has no time for verbal niceties and seems incapable of reading other people’s social cues. She is devoid of empathy. In the middle of the office, Saga will sniff her armpits, grimace in distaste, and strip down to her bra to change T-shirts. Her means of courting romance is walking up to a strange man in a bar and asking if he wants to have sex.
Her long-suffering Danish coun- terpart Martin Rhode (Kim Bodnia) is frustrated by her awkward manners and tries to teach her how to spare other people’s feelings. He advises her, for instance, that it is sometimes OK to tell a white lie: counsel which comes back to haunt him in the first season’s nerveshredding climactic scene.
It’s deeply refreshing to see a character like Saga on screen. Male leads with personality quirks of various kinds are now so common that they’re almost a cliché. We’re finally starting to see a corresponding increase in interestingly flawed female characters. Nurse Jackie is a drug addict. Homeland’s Carrie Mathison is bipolar. Both The Killing’s Sarah Lund and The Fall’s Stella Gibson are cold and obsessively driven.
These are characters not intended solely as eye-candy — although in the American adaptation of The Bridge , producers evidently felt that some female autism would be more palatable washed down with stunning good looks, since they cast the impossibly beautiful Diane Kruger. They are also not role models: in some cases these characters are actually mentally ill, and in their own way sometimes as one-dimensional as the old female TV leads. Nonetheless, there’s still something that feels fresh and provocative about seeing these imperfect characters helming TV shows.
One final push for the Scandinavian version of The Bridge over the US adaptation: when things get too scary, you can mute the sound and carry on reading the subtitles. Schyst , as they say in Swedish.