The new season of “Borgen”, the successful political fiction about the first woman Prime Minister of Denmarkstart with birgitte nyborg at her son’s birthday party, where she leaves the table to wash the dishes while chatting with her ex-husband. An intimate scene in which, in past seasons, the protagonist would have ended up running away, pressed by her agenda, but feeling guilty about her.
For all her political agenda, “Borgen” was always about, at its core, the dual demands women face when trying to balance professional obligations with family and partner needs. This time too, Birgitte barely has time to dry off the last plate before rushing to the office. But no longer feel guilty. “I’m so happy,” he confesses to her ex, “that I don’t have to apologize for working so hard.”
When its fourth season premiered on Netflix this June, nearly 10 years have passed since Danish television broadcast what was to be the finale of “Borgen.” And in that decade, a lot has changed. The immense weight of social networks, urgent climate change, globalized populism and even a new war. The world has become a darker placeand the program, which knew how to anticipate many of these real-life events, reflects it again with a perceptive eye.
Much of the plot of this “Borgen: kingdom, power and glory”, revolves around the multifaceted crisis that unfolds when oil is discovered in Greenland, an autonomous region of Denmark, whose valuable natural resources, both on show and in real life, are the subject of an intense geopolitical struggle between the United States, China, and Russia. The gigantic ice cloth struggles between ecology and the dark side that the oil industry embodies that would provide an outlet for their delayed independence.
But the biggest change is embodied by Birgitte, accompanying that turn to the dark side in the show’s portrayal of accomplished women. She is no longer head of state, but Foreign Minister of Denmark, her children have grown up and she does not have a husband to take care of her. The counterpoint: a manifest need to cling to power at all costs (in a Danish version of Jed Bartlett’s “The West Wing”) in which he abandons values in favor of expediency, betrays allies and even family members; and undermines anyone he perceives as a threat, which in this case, happens to be a vast majority of women.
For viewers accustomed to seeing birgitte nyborg as a feminist icon, the transformation can generate cognitive dissonance. But in his description of powerful women behaving just as badly as men, does Borgen arrive at a new version post-feminist of true equality? Or succumb to one older and misogynistic view of women in the power?
Prejudice that films reflect from “Executive Secretary” (1988), where Sigourney Weaver takes advantage of the ideas of Melanie Griffith; until “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), in which Meryl Streep is the editor of a major women’s magazine (a character based on Anna Wintour, head of Vogue), a boss who mistreats her assistants, editors and journalists. Fictions in which women do not die side by side as in “Thelma and Louise” (1991), the film that is an icon of sorority.
A decade ago, the documentary “Miss Representation” (2011), directed by Jennifer Siebel (current first lady of California: her husband Gavin Newsom is a candidate for the White House among the Democrats), denounced the lack of positive roles for women in power: Jane Fonda, Madonna, Tina Fey, Rosario Dawson and Geena Davis, among many other stars, politicians and journalists, called for more kind heroines. But in today’s cinema, not even male superheroes are infallible.
In 2018, the filmmaker Eléonore Pourriat presented in “I am not an easy man” (Netflix success) a recalcitrant macho who wakes up in an upside-down world where women dominate. A reversal of his 2016 short, “Oppressed Majority,” in which a man is abused by women, and no one, not even his wife, holds him back. Both films denounced by contrast the abuses of power in a macho society. And power always corrupts.
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“Borgen: kingdom, power and glory” seeks according to its creators, turn the page. The series that has predicted a real social and political change, marks her attempt to escape the representation of women, between the poles of idealization and demonization. When it premiered in 2010, no one expected that “Borgen,” with its nerdy take on the intricacies of Scandinavian coalition politics, would become a worldwide hit. That it has done so (the series was distributed in 70 countries) is due in part to the interpretation of Sidse Babett Knudsen, playing a idealistic politics that jumped to the first line.
“Even though he was very professional, his vulnerability was present at all times,” says Adam Price, the show’s creator and co-writer. “In the first episode, before his first speech, he admits, ‘I’m wearing the completely wrong dress for this occasion. But the thing is, I got too fat for the business suit I should have been wearing.’ When we wrote it we realized that those were what people wanted, the real stuff.”
“I received letters from people who inspired by this woman”, adds Knudsen. “The American soldiers wrote to me, to tell me that it was very good that there is a politician in a small and strange country who is doing things well,” laughs the actress, acknowledging the public’s confusion of reality with fiction.
A year after the debut of “Borgen” on DR, the Danish public broadcaster, Denmark elected its first woman as prime minister: Helle Thorning-Schmidt. And Iceland, Sweden, Finland and Estonia would follow: all leaders. And while it would be an exaggeration to suggest that “Borgen” influenced the Danish vote, it is also true that a program watched every Sunday by 1.5 million, that is, 1 in 4 people, could well have given formatted to the environment in which the elections were held.
In the fourth season of the show, as in life, female leadership is no longer the novelty it was. Although the new prime minister now tags her social media posts with #thefutureisfemale, she is also the present. And yet the present looks a lot like the past: the conflict between the two women is a main tension in the show.
Y women fight in the newsroom too from the main newscast, another major plot of the show: Birgitte’s former reporter and adviser, Katrine (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), has become news chief. And she quickly finds herself in conflict with a younger, queer colleague who stars in the siege of the networks. “She fails to exercise leadership and succumbs to the pressure of a firestorm of disqualifications,” admits Sørensen.
Katrine as Birgitte they run from the role of mothersbut finally they flounder emotionally when their children take their toll on them (not so their partners, visibly deconstructed). An aspect that feminist critics claim for the new season, although no less real for that: children will probably always demand, a current discussion in which motherhood is denied in opposition to personal coronation.
Alluded to, the Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidtconcluded after watching the series: “I think it is very important in a feminist sense that let’s not pretend that women have to be perfect. It is also interesting to show someone who is lost. Because that is part of the human condition.”
by RN
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