By Travis Johnson
The new Swedish crime series, Midnight Sun, opens with one of the most striking death scenes to come along in quite some time: a man is tied to a helicopter rotor blade, suffering a rather messy fate when the engine revs up. When the victim turns out to be a French citizen, two investigators are put on the case: French cop Kahina Zadi (Leïla Bekhti), and her Swedish counterpart, Anders Harsnek (Gustaf Hammarsten). When more bodies begin to turn up, each killed in a ritualistic manner, it becomes clear that the killings have some connection to the independence movement of the indigenous Sami people who live in the far north of the Scandinavian nations.
A French/Swedish co-production, it’s the brainchild of Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, probably best known outside of their native Sweden for creating the Nordic Noir series, The Bridge (they also co-directed Underworld: Awakenings, but let’s not dwell on that). Indeed, the pair share a creative partnership that stretches back almost to infancy.
“I’m not very polite to him,”Mårlind says of Stein as we wait for him to join us.”We’ve known each other since we were five and I’ve worked with him every day since then, so I am not polite. I’m very stern to him. That’s how we work.”
Midnight Sun came about through the most prosaic of ways: the pair were asked if they could come up with an idea that might serve as the basis for a French/Swedish co-pro. “There was a situation where French pay TV wanted to work with Swedish television and they didn’t really have an idea that worked,” Stein explains. “So they called us and we said we’d look into it. When we started to do our research we quickly found this resistance movement from this new young generation of Sami. We realised we were quite unaware of the situation of the Indigenous people up north. That gave birth to a lot of ideas and we began to build a story around it.”
Mårlind adds, “We thought that if we know so little about our own Indigenous people, then France, they won’t have any idea that we have what you may say are Indians in Europe. So that was the start for everything.”
For Australian audiences Sweden seems far away, but to make Midnight Sun, the cast and crew had to head even further afield, venturing into the far northern reaches of the country to the lands of the Sami people, where the titular sun holds sway for long stretches of the year. It led to some interesting challenges. “It’s huge distances wherever you want to go,” Mårlind recalls. “And you shoot in remote places where it’s not made to shoot in, so it’s very demanding just to get the camera on the bloody mountain.”
But the biggest challenge was the actual sun itself, always in the sky, and the knock-on effects created by 24 hour daylight. “The midnight sun is not different in any way, it’s not orange or green or anything, it’s just the sun, it just never goes down. How that affects you is that it’s very hard to sleep. That constant lack of sleep, it’s a mysterious and mystical landscape and it’s enhanced by the fact that you don’t sleep and you don’t dream, and if you don’t sleep and dream enough, things come up in your awake state instead. It’s a weird, hard to describe feeling which is, at certain points, otherworldly. So at the point in the story where Kahina is suffering from this, we were suffering from the same experiences.”
Such extreme conditions could not help but affect the final product. “The mystical sleep deprivation state of mind affects the dreaminess that slowly infects the film,” Mårlind avers.
With the growing popularity of Scandinavian crime drama amongst international audiences, it’s easy to wonder if mindfulness of the the overseas market might affect the work – simply, there might be a desire not to make things too specifically Swedish, lest certain cultural mores fail to translate. It’s a notion that is immediately shot down.
“At the end of the day we just have to do what we think is great and hope that other people like it.” Stein says. “If we worry too much about what other people will think, then we’re in deep doodoo.”
“As soon as you start worrying about what other people want, then you become a gun for hire and you’re not creating from the heart.” Mårlind agrees. “And the thing is, you never know what other people want, what will travel and what won’t travel. Sometimes we might think about something, ‘No, this is too Swedish,’ and that turns out that everybody loves it because it’s so exotic. Therefore we don’t know anything and the only thing we do know is that you have to like it yourself. And if you like it yourself then probably someone else will like it too.”
Midnight Sun is streaming on SBS On Demand now.
