A bridge across the unknown straits within us

Awards not yet invented are needed to celebrate the extraordinary performsance of the Swedish actress Sofia Helin in the 2011-18 television series The Bridge.

The word autism is never mentioned, but Lieutenant Saga Noren of the Malmo police department, played hauntingly by Sofia Helin, exhibits the symptoms we have come to associate with autism.

Malmo on the southern coast of Sweden is only 41 kilometers across the Oresund Strait to Copenhagen in Denmark, and the two cities interact closely via various trade and jurisdictional agreements.

Saga Noren is assigned to work with Danish detectives on crimes that involve both countries, even though some of the Danes regard her as a pain in the ass. The Swedes, on the other hand, are accustomed to her eccentricites and rely on her to solve baffling crimes with her exquisitely focused mind.

The reason Helin’s performance is so gripping and memorable is the fact that she is intensely aware of her social handicaps: she can’t bear touch except in sexual encounters when she is gaspingly blunt, she is comically intolerant of circumlocutive speech, she really doesn’t know how to smile or to act appropriately at funerals of wedding or parties. The fact that she is matter-of-factly beautiful makes her all the more dicey to deal with.

But Saga Noren wants to understand emotion, she wants to be able to respond as her colleagues do to the drama life routingly engulfs us in, she wants to understand the people she is so unlike. Helin plays this role with an understatement that endears her to us, makes us trust her, root for her, believe in her. It is a wondrous acting feat and, although The Bridge is rightly acclaimed for its deft direction and noirish cinematography, the industry has been criminally negligent in failing to hail the subtlety and riveting magnegtism of Helin’s Saga Noren. She achieves that almost incredible triumph of haunting the scenes in which she is absent while deferring to other actors when she is in or near the camera’s lens.

The Swedish and Danish detectives are collegial in spite of differences, and the actors playing them leave us with the impression that they made the series in a collegial atmosphere.

Helin’s performance, never straying into the overt, suggests that we have much to learn from autism and exhibit many of its aspects ourselves even if we’re not officially on the spectrum.

The last scenes of the series are a stunning summation of Saga’s predicament, and as the credits begin to roll we are keenly aware of our bereftitude.