Wallander

The three BBC productions of Kenneth Braunagh's portrayal of Henning Mankill's introspective detective Kurt Wallander are works of art. On the level of 'Jar City'. Braunagh is spectacular--whatever you think of his personal life, he is a great actor, and he has given this role his all.
With the unusual addition of having diabetes, Wallander is a pretty standard crime novel detective. Apart from the obligatory dysfunctional family life, and the inability to communicate emotionally, he sometimes drinks too much and can be an idiosyncratic and impulsive maverick, constantly wrong-footing his colleagues by rushing into danger on his own. What makes it truly distinctive is the pervasive atmosphere of Nordic gloom, which Braunagh channels impressively.
This infuses the landscapes, however beautiful, and the characters who all seem to be victims of seasonal affective disorder. Branagh has said that the “bleakish landscape and atmosphere” make Sweden “a good place for drama”. Even Wallander’s mobile phone rings with an angst-ridden vibrating groan as it lies on his immaculately polished floor.
The effect is intensified by some wonderful, if chilly, cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle. Moody interiors are interspersed with shots of crops shivering in the cold wind. It is, apparently, the first British film to be shot directly on to a massively capacious hard-drive with a gizmo called the Red Camera, which produces images many times sharper than normal high definition.
Devotees of Henning Mankell will doubtless spot, and perhaps be annoyed by, many liberties and divergences from the original novels, but TV adaptations should always be judged primarily as works in their own right. Mankell himself has seen the first episode and said he “liked it enormously”, adding that it was right to create something completely new.
Wallander is that rare treasure: a popular form used for intelligent, thoughtful, classy drama and superbly shot. Ystad is decidedly Swedish topography. And like Simenon’s Paris or Colin Dexter’s Oxford, Mankell has created a place of his own, similar to and in parallel with the real location, and it deserves to become as familiar to us all.