I see, to my surprise, that I never got around to reviewing the first two seasons of The Tunnel - the British/French take on the Swedish/Danish Bron/Broen, and the American The Bridge. Indeed, though I reviewed The Bridge, I thought it was not the best of the three. That accolade belongs to The Tunnel, though I have yet to see the last two seasons of Bron/Broen, so I conceivably could change that ranking.
Not likely, though, seeing as how good The Tunnel, especially its final season 3, is. I've admired Stephen Dillane's work since I saw him play Thomas Jefferson in the John Adams mini-series in 2008 (I thought it was longer ago than that). He plays Karl, the British and non-Asperger's detective. Clémence Poésy I don't recall having seen before - actually, she was in some Harry Potters and In Bruges, a movie my wife and I loved, and she does a fine job playing Elise in The Tunnel. In all three versions, the detective with all the advantages and disadvantages of Asperger's - the focus on logic and details, the lack of social sensitivities - is a woman.
Also in all three version, the team is sooner or later thrust into a severe moral dilemma - whether to save this person or that, when at least one of the likely victims is someone beloved to at least one of the detectives. This moral choice - whom to throw a rope to when two people, not near each other, are drowning - was given the best presentation, the epitome of this dilemma, I thought, in the final episode of The Tunnel.
I won't say anymore about that, in case you haven't seen it. I will say that all three versions require a strong stomach, meaning the villains they deal with are as perverse and ethically as ugly as these sort of monsters come. In fact, the going was so rough in season 3 of The Tunnel that I was close to deciding I didn't like it as much as the other versions and seasons. Until the ending.
So ... see this. It's human beings with souls fighting humans who've lost them, a story that typifies a lot of our age, and presented here at its searing best.
Hitchcock/Truffaut, a 1966 book of interviews of film genius Alfred Hitchcock by film genius François Truffaut, is generally recognized as one of the best, if not the best, book about the strategies of film making ever published. I certainly do, and just this term at Fordham had reason to cite in one of my classes Hitchcock's distinction between surprise and suspense mentioned in the book. (Surprise is when the viewer doesn't know what's going to happen - a bomb suddenly explodes on a crowded bus. Suspense is when the viewer knows there'a a bomb ticking on a crowded bus. Hitchcock correctly thinks suspense is usually a much stronger way to go.)
