Own the rights?
This is the way the Swedish Wallander films should have been made in the first place, if at all. I must confess to not having read the books, but I have seen a few of the Swedish films, all done in kind of the same old, drab way that Swedish TV-films are produced: the same old cast is there, the same old way of acting (often as though a character never changes), boring cinematography, horrendous dialogue, bad soundtrack and what seems like no pretensions whatsoever. It's all very meat-and- potatoes. You know exactly what you'll be served, how it'll be presented and how you'll feel having finished it off, especially if you've seen even one previous episode in a series of these Swedish detective films, most notably "Beck". The Wallander series is successful, both as books and as TV films. Successful enough to lure people from England into doing a few TV-films, thankfully using fresh ideas. The film begins where Wallander witnesses an act of self-immolation. It continues with him and his team trying to unveil the identity of the girl who killed herself this way and why, while at the time more crimes are being committed, and are they related in some way? While the police team is focused upon, Wallander's relation to his daughter, his father and his failed marriage are happening. The episodes are spoken in English, but everything else is Swedish; they even shot a lot of footage in Sweden. As I am myself from Sweden, where I live and breathe to this day, it's very refreshing to see people from abroad come in and use our culture to build a quite carefully planned detective drama, where the main character, police detective Kurt Wallander (as played by Kenneth Branagh), is a middle-aged, quite sad character. Branagh portrays Wallander quite humanly, using subtleties and the character's general down-faced mood and thinking to lead the way. The cinematography leaves the Swedish equivalent in the dust, and the direction is tight; as previously stated, this is simply put how I think the series should be done. True, the pronounciation of some words (e.g. "Ystad" like "Gstaad") strike me as interesting and funny, but there are such crisp, subtle clarities left everywhere in this that point to what is so intricately Swedish in some ways, e.g. the bag-in-box phenomenon - as Swedes often purchase their wine in a 3-liter box rather than in a bottle - that leaves any weird ways of saying words in the attic of one's mind. On the characters, I don't think there are any real archetypical edges visible, but rather an assortment of humans who struggle with their personal lives as well as their professional roles. Hence, I feel they become more interesting as the film goes on, even if the progression is slight. All in all, I recommend this series and will most definitely check out the other ones. The Swedish film industry, are you taking notes? You should well be.
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