A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
