Anno 1790

  

Here’s another example of something I wrote about, two weeks ago.  First, a period mystery, and secondly, a story that breaks off in mid-stride.  This is no reason not to invest your heart, but be warned.  It proves faithless, and you’re abandoned. 

The year, you may guess, is 1790.  Sweden a commercial and military power in the Baltic, an inconclusive war with Russia ended, the Swedish parliament brought to heel by the king, Gustav III.  He himself will be assassinated, two years later, and this political ferment, between monarchy and parliament, the old aristocracy, the rising merchant estates, and a resentful peasantry and urban underclass, is the engine of discontent: the French Revolution is both an inspiration and cautionary tale.  The storyline, though, is a police procedural, set in a time of unease.

A military surgeon, Johan Daadh, a veteran of the Russian war, is enlisted as a police commissioner by Stockholm’s chief constable.  The tension is political, for one, Daadh being a progressive and a rebel sympathizer (I use rebel advisedly), and his boss a royalist, and then he falls for the guy’s wife.  She, too, has a mind of her own – a midwife, she performs an abortion on her niece – but has to operate under social constraints.  The chief constable isn’t by any means unsympathetic, either.  He’s hemmed in by convention, and the law, and a patronage system that saddles him with malicious opportunists.  This is one of the reasons he recruits Daadh.  Neither the doc nor the chief’s wife, however, are anachronistic characters.  Daadh is a rationalist, but he’s still a product of the late 18^th century, and he doesn’t harbor impossibly modern ideas about disease vectors, say.  That would make the whole show impossibly dumb.

(You might not agree with me, but that’s exactly why The Name of the Rose is so insufferable, both the novel and the movie.  Nobody thought that way, in the 14^th century.)

Anno 1790 is a Swedish production, and beautifully produced it is.  The cinematography alone, shot in digital, is breathtaking; the art direction and locations are terrific; even the hair, the wigs, the rouge, appear candlelit.  We suspect these people probably smell a little ripe, and they slather on the powder and scent.  It’s all very wintry and halfway medieval, much of which is probably CGI, but that didn’t bother me.  The mysteries themselves could be sharper, and the longeurs are a little frustrating.  There could be more politics - some sedition, some conspiracy – and there should definitely be more bodice-ripping, but for the most part, it remains amiable and decorous.  The leads are charming and convincing.  I’m especially taken with Linda Zilliacus, a Finnish actress who plays the troubled wife.  Each episode is self-contained, backgrounded by the longer story arc.  My only complaint is that there isn’t more of it.  Why, with the production values and historical appeal, it didn’t get a second season, is beyond me. 

This is just one of those abiding curiosities.  How come Duster only got eight episodes?  Who pulled the plug on Island at War, or Three Pines?  We’re never going to learn if Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes is comatose moonshine, or a boat ride on the Styx.  Perhaps it’s better we don’t.