Light On Dark Water

Wallander

I was vaguely aware of the existence of the series of murdery mysteries featuring this Swedish detective, but have never read one. The local PBS network has begun showing the BBC productions based on them, and I watched the first one a couple of nights ago. I say "first" but it's actually the first episode of the third season. I don't think the preceding ones were shown here; if they were, I missed hearing about them.

This episode, "Incident in Autumn," was excellent, but very grim. It's about some pretty nasty stuff, and the story takes place in winter so it's…well, very grim. But also very well done–Kenneth Branagh plays Wallander. And the story has substance. It presents terrible deeds, but with a sense of deep compassion that's not always present in the genre.

I don't have time to say much about it beyond recommending it. But there was one thing that surprised me a bit, although I'm sure it shouldn't have: I didn't know–how to say this?–well, I'll just use the old term, offensive though it is–I didn't know there is white trash in Sweden, too. I think of Sweden as being full of comfortable practical bourgeoisie. 

There is also a Swedish Wallander series. If it's available here (with subtitles!), it would be interesting to see. I see Netflix lists it but it isn't currently available.

Maclin Horton
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34 responses to “Wallander”

  1. Janet

    I see that you can watch this on the PBS website. I hope it’s still there after I finish watching seasons 1 & 2 on DVD.
    It’s strange to think of a season being three episodes, but I kind of like it. They don’t try to stretch a story forever and unto ages of ages. The would have to include a lot of dross if they did, and they seem just right at this length.
    AMDG

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  2. Mac

    I was about to say it wouldn’t matter if you mixed them up, sequence-wise, but I guess it might. Not the individual murder mysteries, but the ancillary relationship-type stuff.

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  3. Janet

    I do have trouble thinking of these people being in Sweden. The landscape and the architecture are Swedish, but the people just seem like your typical BBC cast.
    AMDG

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  4. Mac

    I don’t know what you’ve seen in the episodes you’ve watched, but in this one there’s a family we would call rednecks of a bad sort: living in a dirty dump protected by vicious dogs, criminal and violent from time to time, etc.
    I’ve watched so many BBC productions now that I recognize a certain number of the actors from one series to the next. The redneck guy, for instance, was the murderer in a recent Inspector Lewis. And Wallander’s girlfriend was someone I’ve seen often, though I don’t know her name.

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  5. Janet

    Oh yes, that is part of the fun of watching BBC productions. “That is the guy who was the butler in X and the hunter in Y.” And the people who were in Harry Potter are in everything.
    AMDG

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  6. Rob G

    I’ve watched all the Wallanders except the final one of the 3rd season. I like them, but mainly because of Branagh and the gritty, grainy style of direction. I’ve read 2 or 3 of the books but haven’t found them particularly compelling. Rebus spoiled me, I think!
    By the way, they’re all grim!

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  7. Mac

    Had a feeling they might be (all grim).

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  8. Marianne

    I didn’t know there is white trash in Sweden, too. I think of Sweden as being full of comfortable practical bourgeoisie.
    Isn’t that largely because it’s been pushed as being a socialist paradise by the left since, when, the 1960s?
    Had a feeling they might be (all grim).
    But surely that has got to be a huge draw for you, a lover of all things Ingmar Bergman!

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  9. Mac

    Both good points. Point 1: there might be a little of that, but it’s more to do with an overall impression, which includes one very brief visit there, more than 40 years ago. I’m left by that with the impression of a beautiful countryside, and Stockholm a clean and pleasant city. When I think of it as socialist, I don’t think paradise, but I do think–well, I guess I said it already: satisfied comfortable educated totally secularized prudent bourgeoisie, where, for instance, there is no sexual morality but the women never forgot to take their pill. A reasonably well-run sort of socialism, which I think is possible in a fairly small and homogeneous nation. What American liberals dream of instituting here, which I think is impossible.

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  10. Mac

    And point 2: I had been thinking about that, actually, and if I’d had time would have said something about it in the post. Part of the difference is that Bergman is a much greater artist, and the bleakness of some of his movies points to philosophical depths that the Wallander stories, if this one is a good indication, don’t reach. And part of it is the sheer aesthetic appeal of most of Bergman’s work: the cinematography and acting.
    Also, the Wallander bleakness is different: it’s not Crime and Punishment, and it’s not Hour of the Wolf, it’s just sad sordid stuff.

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  11. Craig

    I watched a couple of episodes of this show a few years ago — it was October 2009, I remember, so it was probably Season 1.
    I liked aspects of it, but, as you say, it was pretty bleak, and I also found the “BBC-isms” in the production style annoying (portentious music, rapid-fire scene changes, and that sort of thing, which also afflict the BBC Dickens adaptations of recent years, and Sherlock, and probably other shows as well). I stopped watching the show because, much like Mankell’s novels themselves, I found that once it was over I never thought about it again.
    Of course, it could be that it has improved as it has gone on.

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  12. Rob G

    Mankell seems to be a (somewhat) disaffected Leftist. In an interview I remember him saying something about having to ask why Socialism did not bring about the type of society that the Leftists of his era thought it would, and that maybe they were wrong about some things.

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  13. Mac

    Maybe! That makes me think of another Swedish production Let the Right One In. It was set in, I think, the early ’80s or so, and in an interview on the dvd he said they worked hard to recreate the drab socialist environment of the period. I don’t know that the country is any less socialist now, but he made it sound like the atmosphere now is more…capitalist or consumerist. At any rate he obviously liked it better.

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  14. Mac

    Interesting, Craig, that you remark on the fast cutting etc. I’ve always hated that, too, but I didn’t really notice it in this Wallander. I wonder if that means I’m getting used to it.
    I was really annoyed by the camera angles in Bleak House–suffocatingly close and off-kilter, such as a conversation between two people with one of them viewed through a space in the back of a chair or something. Though in other respects it was a really fine production

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  15. Janet

    Yes, Rob. The first episode of the first series is a good example of that. He seems to be really making a point about the horrid results of having sexual climate where everything is permissible.
    AMDG

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  16. Mac

    The one I saw didn’t give me any particular sense of making a point, but it certainly painted a dreary picture of the sexual climate. Three murders, all of the victims young women, two of them prostitutes and the other hanging out with a pimp, and there was no glamorization whatsoever of their lives–which were, to use that word again, bleak.

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  17. Craig

    I hear you about the Dickens adaptation, Mac. If a director is going to conspicuously insert himself between the viewer and the story, so that we’re thinking about him as much as about the story he’s telling, he’d better be a genius. Television doesn’t have many geniuses on the payroll.

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  18. Marianne

    I read one of Mankell’s non-Wallander novels a couple of years ago–The Man from Beijing. It was filled with nostalgia for Maoism and sadness that present-day China has lost its Maoist “principles” and veered toward capitalism.
    Interesting note: Mankell is married to one of Ingmar Bergman’s daughters.

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  19. Mac

    Well, that is interesting indeed. As for the Mao-nostalgia–no society that really exists can please a dedicated leftist for very long. I assume he did not emigrate to China during the heyday.

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  20. Paul

    Well, given that the author is a Communist keen to point up the insufficiency of democratic socialism …

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  21. Mac

    Hadn’t thought of that. I guess if you’re a leftist living in a somewhat-left society and seeing that it’s fairly far from perfect, your choice is either to rethink your politics or figure the problem is that it isn’t far enough left.

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  22. Grumpy

    I bought the Swedish wallander a couple years ago and was disappointed. I had read rave reviews of both English @ swedish versions. The series I saw was predictable and full of secular moralizing. It put me off trying the English one.

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  23. Mac

    Offhand I can’t think of any moralizing at all in the one I saw, unless you count the effect on Wallander himself of dealing with the crimes he investigates. I wonder which is more faithful to the book(s).

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  24. Paul

    I only have this at second hand, but I gather there’s quite a lot of socio-political preachiness in the original Swedish that might not all make it into the translations.

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  25. Grumpy

    Yes it’s the preachiness I didn’t like.

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  26. Mac

    Thinking about it a bit more, I feel fairly confident that you would at least not dislike the BBC one. They’re currently showing on PBS, if you have access to that. “currently” is sort of a loose term where PBS is concerned–local stations have a lot of leeway about when to show things. The second episode of season 3 is on tonight here.

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  27. janet

    And you can watch it on th PBS website a day or two after it airs. I was going to do this but I decided watching teo seasons at once was entirely too much grimness.
    AMDG

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  28. Beth

    If you read the books, you get what shaped Wallander in addition to the nordic gloom, especially his father. I’ve always had trouble watching Branagh in anything because he has no lips and looks like a Muppet when he speaks.

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  29. Mac

    [chuckle] Which muppet? I didn’t notice the absence of lips.
    That was probably a good decision, Janet.

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  30. Rob G

    I really like Branagh — Henry V and Hamlet especially. And also that Hitchcockian thriller he did with Emma Thompson and Derek Jacobi, which was the first thing I saw him in.

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  31. Craig

    He’s good as Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing too!

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  32. Janet

    Well, I don’t have any lips either, so I hope you never have to meet me, Beth. Then again, I’ve always thought my googly eyes and blue fur were more distracting.
    Darn, now I know I’m going to fixate on KB’s mouth when I watch the next one.
    I agree, Craig!
    AMDG

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  33. Grumphy

    I don’t have a telly. I will sometime get one series of the English Wallander on DVD.

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  34. Mac

    Like I said earlier, I think you would at least not dislike it.
    What is this Hitchcockian thing y’all are talking about?

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