Television rating|In the Swedish Painkiller series, an immigrant mother and an artist daughter search for common ground and relief from their mother’s fibromyalgia.
Mother Dijana has once left Yugoslavia as a guest worker in Austria and moved from there with his family to Gothenburg, Sweden. She has worked all her life as a cleaner, until the chronic pain syndrome fibromyalgia took away her ability to work.
Andrea’s thirty-year-old daughter has developed into a performance artist, and has already gained fame, but she doesn’t really survive her career crises alone, but has moved back to her mother’s meat dams.
Andrea (Dodona Imeri) became a performance artist.
by Gabriela Pichler (b. 1980) personal comedy series Painkiller is a merciless cannonade, in which both smug Swedes and hypocritical artists get their share.
Andrea balances between her art bubble and her working-class background. He tries to make his mother understand what he is doing and starts a project with the aim of easing her pain.
At the same time, the mother attends a course where women with fibromyalgia are taught to accept their condition. The course will stop when the city’s funding runs out, and participants are suggested to start a Facebook group.
For starters, Andrea shapes a statue of her mother, which ends up in front of a nearby restaurant. Soon the parts change, and in a sense of her power, the mother wants to make her own work of art out of her daughter.
The daughter is easily discouraged, but the mother kicks her ass: “I’ve been working since I was ten!” Mother has never taken a vacation, and the contradiction also comes from the fact that, in my mother’s opinion, the dictator of Yugoslavia Tito was a good man who cared for his people.
Pichler has been successful in Sweden with his films, and Painkiller is his first TV series. Pichler has a spouse as a work partner Johan Lundborgso in fact the series also describes his life – and his mother-in-law.
The six-part series alternates between barren urban milieus and the kitsch that mom loves. The editing is stealthy, the description a gestural everyday realism, the music loud. The wisdom lies in precise dialogue and charming characters.
Casting has been invested. The mother is played by a bongattu from a lunch restaurant Snezana SpanenoskaAndrea’s role is played by a professional, Dodona Imeri. In an interview with Variety magazine Pichler and Lundborg praise the chemistry between the main actors.
The role of Dijana’s mother, who moved from the Balkans to Sweden, is skillfully played by amateur actress Snezana Spanenoska.
Painkiller is caught up in time, like other grinding, painful Comedies and satires, such as Netflix’s British series Baby Reindeer.
Painkiller the genre may bring to mind a Finnish director Tia Kouvo and his debut film Grandma, and it’s not entirely a coincidence. Kouvo graduated from the same film school as Pichler in Gothenburg.
So who would order a comedy series from Kouvo? For once, Finland could catch up on TV trends on time.
Painkiller, Yle Areena and Theme Sun 4.8. at 8:10 p.m.
Read more: In the movie Grandma, tragic themes are combined with comedy, and that’s a difficult mark to tick
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