Just been watching the first of a series of BBC adaptations of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series. As you may be able to guess from the "Bookworm" sidebar on my blog, I'm a fan of the books... so I'm afraid I'm going to come up with a classic reaction to the TV adaptation. You see, one of the problems with a writer like Mankell is that his sense of place is acute, and it comes across in every detail of the books.
Wallander doesn't live in a detached house with posh furniture and wood-panelled walls; he lives in a town-centre apartment block, where he has to use the basement laundry on a rota with the other residents. The person who turns out to be the murderer lives on the fifth floor of a squalid block, not in an elegant detached country house. Wallander's police headquarters is functional and slightly depressing; it doesn't have abstract interior murals and montages of historic cameo photo portraits. Wallander's father doesn't live on the coast, and he's never described as doing anything as un-introspective as standing on the jetty gazing out to sea.
The Beeb deserves marks for making the series in Skåne, in southern Sweden, to be sure, but all the Swedes I've spoken to about Skåne describe it with a certain sense of alienation. The other Swedes, they say, regard Skåne's inhabitants with a certain suspicion... they don't quite belong; they live rather a long way south; their TV aerials don't point inwards towards Sweden, but outwards towards Denmark...
And that's the essence of the problem with the Wallander adaptation: it's had a Swedish make-over. This isn't Skåne as Mankell describes it, it's the Sweden of designer furniture, polished wooden floors and crisp, tasteful interiors. What Mankell depicts is a Sweden bewildered by changing social mores, cheap tastelessness and the impact of immigration and liberal social policy. The adaptation may yet make for good telly, but as so often happens, it is not going to match up to what the author has put into the minds of his readers.
The late Douglas Adams said that the reason he wrote for radio rather than film or TV was that on radio, the visual effects were better.
![[RSS Newsfeed]](/themes/sotto/images/valid-rss.png)
![[This is a Roller site]](/themes/sotto/images/roller-logo.gif){kind=logo}
The Swedish movies are actually quite good. If you know Swedish :)
Looking forward to checking this new series out. The books are great.
/Magnus
Posted by Magnus Stjernstrom on November 30, 2008 at 11:36 PM GMT+00:00 #
Takk for det, Magnus. Jeg bør lære Svensk...
Posted by Robin Wilton on December 01, 2008 at 04:37 PM GMT+00:00 #
Another morose detective, with music reminiscent of Morse. Even the wife was getting bored, and that's something for someone who watches QVC!!
Posted by PC Plod on December 01, 2008 at 06:14 PM GMT+00:00 #
I'm very disappointed by the the first of the series. Some of that may be to do with the fact that it's only rarely that films or TV seem to live up to books that one admires, but I've tried to stand back from that and my half-swedishness.
Although it's filmed in Skåne I feel that it gives little sense of place and the torturing of the language is lazy and inexcusable. It might as well have been filmed on a set at Pinewood or wherever.
It feels to me a bit like the various Eastenders excursions out of London.
Posted by Robbie Pennington on December 02, 2008 at 08:09 AM GMT+00:00 #
Fair comment, Robbie - especially on the language (though I'm not in a position to comment on Eastenders, I regret... ;^).
I mean, how hard can it be to get the cast not to rhyme "Wallander" with "Hollander", and "Nyberg" with "Dreiberg".
At least there was one guy who (as far as I would be able to tell) briefly pronounced Ystad plausibly - but even he seemed to give up in embarassment after a couple of goes. Argh.
Posted by Robin Wilton on December 02, 2008 at 09:37 AM GMT+00:00 #
I look forward to watching the BBC version. As Magnus says, the Swedish version with Krister Henriksson in pretty good: it captures Wallander's emotional isolation well, and is (according to Amazon) available with English subtitles - man behöver inte lärer sig svenska!
You are quite right about the importance of the environment to the mood of the books. So: just how many hot-dogs does Kenneth Branagh eat?
Posted by Patrick Finch on December 02, 2008 at 11:42 AM GMT+00:00 #
Ah, well there you have it, Patrick... there is a distinct pølse-mangel about the whole thing.
Branagh does look convincingly rumpled, but the tension between him and Linda often dissolves into wry smiles and even laughter. It's engaging, but it's not Wallander...
All the restaurant/bar interiors are far too tastefully Scandinavian, and although he does sip at the occasional rustic mug of coffee, I can't see where this Wallander's incipient diabetes is going to emerge from.
Posted by Robin Wilton on December 02, 2008 at 11:56 AM GMT+00:00 #
I'm sometimes forced to watch Eastenders, completely against my will of course!
I think the thing that characterised the soap's foreign excursions for me was the strange "little-england" narrow vision of what "abroad" is like.
The BBC Wallander fails to set the narrative in any broader context - even the camera angles seemed narrow.
Posted by Robbie Pennington on December 03, 2008 at 09:24 AM GMT+00:00 #
I agree... the books have that strong theme running through them, whether justified or not, of despair at what Sweden is coming to. There was one brief hint at it as Wallander drove past some fighting kids at one point, but beyond that it was just air-brushed out.
So - at least now I know how to stimulate comment traffic... blog about something off the telly ;^)
Posted by Robin Wilton on December 03, 2008 at 09:38 AM GMT+00:00 #
...or about Sweden :)
Posted by Patrick Finch on December 03, 2008 at 09:45 AM GMT+00:00 #
After living in Sweden for a couple of years I prefer the Swedish version shown on BBC 4 this weekend. There is a more primeval darkness to the Swedish version. However the photography in the BBC version is stunning, I think helped by using the new red one camera.
Will be interesting to see how the series progresses.
Posted by Stephen Bamforth on December 07, 2008 at 06:52 PM GMT+00:00 #