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TRAVELOGUE
M made forU R DE R
As filming starts on the third series of hit Danish-Swedish crime series The Bridge, Mark Henshall explores Malmo and the Skane region for clues
E
arly morning, and the warm sun of Scandinavia feels hypnotic. Light flits through evenly spaced gaps in the roadside, pulsing through the windscreen and onto our faces. It dances on our tired
eyes as the metallic sky above cracks open and glints, playing with the waters that lap beneath us. As we drive smoothly along, cables either
side of the highway rise up like a huge ribcage, encasing the traffic. Copenhagen recedes behind us and we are, for a time, neither here nor there — halfway across a ruler-straight divide between two places. Waves of ethereal noises are rolling, shape-shifting and crashing to a euphoric crescendo that fills my head and my heart. I’m on the iconic Oresund Bridge, in the strait
between Sweden and Denmark that connects the cities of Malmo and Copenhagen. Te music playing is Hollow Talk, by Choir of Young Believers, the melancholy but strangely uplifting theme music for the Te Bridge — part of the wave of ‘Nordic Noir’ TV dramas that have struck a chord with UK audiences. Te series, which starts with the discovery of a
body lying directly across the line dividing the two countries, follows Wallander, Te Killing, Borgen and authors like Stieg Larsson (Millennium series) into dark territory, delving into the underbelly of Swedish and Danish society. If that sounds bleak, it doesn’t seem to put off viewers here, who’ve been
hooked. When season two of Te Bridge premiered in the UK, it got the best ever ratings for a drama series on BBC4, and the first series was sold to 120 countries, with two remakes. Te third series is being filmed now. Part of Te Bridge’s appeal is the powerfully
intense and, often funny, interplay between the two very different detectives heading up the case: the sensitive, laid-back Dane Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) and the logical, socially awkward Swedish singleton Saga Noren (Sofia Helin). Much has been made of these characters reflecting the stereotypical easy-going Dane and more proper Swede, respectively, but when I meet the creator and writer, Hans Rosenfeldt, he says the main thing was to give conventionally perceived “female traits to Martin” and “male traits to Saga”. Even though the contrasts between the two
detectives are marked, the Danish and Swedish landscapes have a unifying effect. Rosenfeldt studiously avoids tourist landmarks and says: “I wanted to make it feel like it’s not two different countries but a universe of its own.” Fittingly, many people living in this area still feel they have plenty in common with those across the water. Our guide tells us that when the nine-mile bridge opened 15 years ago, many saw it as the closing of a circle — the Southern Swedish Skane region and Malmo belonged to Denmark until 1658, when the region became Swedish.
46 ABTA Magazine February 2015
countrybycountry.com
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