Henriette Steenstrup
“PERNILLE” (Netflix)
I cannot say enough good things about “Pernille,” a funny/touching Norwegian series about a single mother, her two daughters and the people in their lives.
How good is this show? So good that when I had watched all 30 episodes (five seasons of six half-hour episodes) I was bereft. Felt like I’d lost good friends, or maybe a family member.
The show was created and written by Henriette Steenstrup, who also plays the title character. What a performance!!!
Steenstrup’s Pernille is a 45-year-old divorce who works in child protective services (the source of the show’s most sobering moments). Caring for others is Pernille’s thing — her two spoiled daughters shamelessly manipulate her and she’s also got her fingers in the life of her widowed father (Nils Ole Oftebro), who at age 75 announces he’s gay.
As the series begins the family is mourning the traffic accident death of her sister Anne. Almost every night Pernille retreats to her garage to call her sibling’s number and leave confessional messages that will never be answered.
Pernille is aflood with conflicting emotions, all of which flicker across Steenstrup’s features like lightning dapplling a clouded sky. In the wrong hands this display of unfettered expression could seem gimmicky and off-putting. Overacting with a capital “O.”
Instead it is ingratiating. Steenstrup’s Pernille has more than a little in common with Jason Sudiekis’ Ted Lasso; both are flawed characters whose humane cores confirm that with the right perspective this world can be a blessing.
So over the course of the series we find her engaged in an on-again off-again relationship with a municipal lawyer (Gunnar Eiriksson) more than a decade her junior. The daughters (Vivild Falk Berg, Ebba Jacobsen Oberg) slowly discard their maddening petulance and entitlement and become good people. Grandpa finds love and in one of the show’s more amusing plot lines becomes a veritable bridezilla planning his same-sex marriage.
The show is nothing if not charitable when it comes to the human condition. Even the shows’s erstwhile heavy, Perille’s ex (Jan Gunnar Roise) is allowed to reveal the man-boy insecurities beneath his pompous intellectualism.
Give this show a chance and it will hook you with the first episode.
Cecilia Suarez, Alvaro Rico
“THE GARDENER” (Netflix)
The old gimmick about a hit man who falls for the woman he’s supposed to kill gets buffed up and turned inside out in “The Gardener,” a six-part Spanish miniseries that is my current guilty pleasure.
Our killer is Elmer (Alvaro Rico), a bespectacled twenty something who runs a nursery/greenhouse operation with his mother China (Cecilia Suarez). Elmer has a spectacular green thumb…his lush gardens are practically tourist attractions.
His secret? All the decomposing human bodies beneath the beds.
But Elmer isn’t your typical movie tough guy or skin-crawling ghoul. After suffering head trauma in the same childhood auto accident that cost his mother her leg, Elmer lost his emotions.
No love. No joy. No fear. No envy. No guilt. No regret. The kid’s an emotional blank slate, an innocent, really. The ideal state for a killer.
China, once a minor movie star, now accepts murder contracts which are executed by her stoically efficient son.
All goes well until Elmer is hired to eliminate Violeta (Catalina Sopelana), a young elementary school teacher. Wouldn’t you know…for the first time Elmer feels stirrings of romantic love. This complicates things.
Created and written by Miguel Baez Carral, “The Gardener” delivers its ridiculousness with a mostly-straight face. We’re talking telenovello-level melodrama, but instead of laughing it all off the screen we go along for the ride.
“The Gardener” is crammed with rcultural eferences and plot twists. For starters, there’s the China/Elmer relationship, an Iberian permutation of “Bates Motel,” with a manipulative mother and her loving boy.
And periodically we find ourselves hanging out with a couple of local cops (Francis Lorenzo and Maria Vazquez), middle-aged drones bored to tears with their gig on the missing persons desk and energized when they stumble onto their very own a serial killer. Their scenes are a hoot.
In fact, the acting here is way better than required. Rico’s Elmer is a lost soul who gets our sympathy despite his high body count; we want desperately for him to find love. Sopelana’s Violeta is dead on as an good-girl educator who, as it turns out, has a few secrets of her own.
But the star here is Suarez’s China. Born in Mexico, educated in the States and a veteran of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, Suarez oozes a hypnotic blend of sexy/crazy. With her black hair and penchant for long black capes she seems to be taking her cues from the Wicked Queen in Disney’s “Snow White.” It’s an eye-rolling perf without any actual eye-rolling. Very sly.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 