Let’s look at a story of a small town that finds in hockey a way to exorcise their isolation and loneliness.
It’s Sweden there’s snow to the brim, and the place is called Beartown. Seen this way, it could be considered the perfect context for a family and sports drama, but the series – which has the same name as its setting – is one of those surprising stories, and unfairly could be going unnoticed among the programming of HBO and HBO GO.
Beartown, which is airing Mondays at 7 p.m. it deserves to be seen and commented on because it escapes the comfortable stories of teenage teams battling for a goal. I would call it the ‘Rocky effect’, the one that has a clear path to take the viewer from empathy to expectation and finally to the excitement overflowing with maximum triumph.
You may be interested in: Eight films to celebrate Women’s Day
But Beartown makes a less epic portrait. There is this emotion, and at first one seems to understand that the thing goes by the sides of claiming a village with low self-esteem, but the thing gets murky and what seemed like a picture of positive emotions becomes the showcase where one sees the lack of compassion of a community that presses with all these young people to achieve what their elders never achieved.
A situation that is not new, but that in the framework of the series feeds on an interesting twist in what violence and abuse make its appearance. Then the game or the life of Peter, a star already retired from hockey who returns to his home ground to give the youth team a major championship, goes into the background.
Well said Peter Grönlund, the director of Beartown, in a talk with THE TIME: “It’s not a sport in itself; it is a denunciation of toxic masculinity and the silence that often demonstrates a society that does not care about truth or justice, but something else. “
It is a denunciation of the toxic masculinity and silence that often demonstrates a society that does not care about truth or justice,
And this thing he raises is nothing more than the concept of the winner as the engine of the whole story, but counted from a sharper perspective, recognizing his evil or dishonest nature. Beartown is a kind of laboratory where one witnesses the questionable behaviors of this small cell of broken dreams.
You may be interested: The movie ‘Lavaperros’ is the most watched Netflix in Colombia
A space in which the consequences of an atrocious act do not seem to matter because there is something greater that cannot be sacrificed, that must not be restrained, an indescribable emotion that is already close to being experienced, when in reality the context is full of emotional fractures and deep pains.
A terrifying contrast that catches the eye of those on the other side of the screen, who could debate or be frightened by this story that without so much hysteria or excess remembers a cruel principle in which the best way to deal with a tragedy is turn your back on him.
Andrés Hoyos Vargas
@ AndresHoy1
CABLE NAVIGATORS