An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
