Cardinal is a Canadian TV police procedural series which has just completed its second season on BBC4 in the UK in the usual Saturday night slot for European noir crime serials. I had watched most of Season 1, but for various reasons didn’t finish it. I must now go back because I was very engaged by Season 2. For the last couple of episodes I switched the subtitles on and I found it much easier to follow the dialogue. The series is broadcast in both English and French in Canada I think. I don’t know if the French is dubbed. I assume that the English language version I watched was synch sound but it does follow that unfortunate Hollywood convention which allows actors to mumble. Apart from that I found it impressive.
The first two seasons of the show are adaptations of novels by Giles Blunt and the third and fourth seasons are expected to follow in a similar way. The first two books each get 6 x 42 episodes or just over 4 hours of screen time, just about enough to be classified as ‘long-form’ TV narratives, allowing a literary or cinematic pacing. Blunt himself is linked to the writing team on the adaptations (which don’t necessarily follow the order of the original novels). The setting is the fictional city of Algonquin Bay which appears to be very closely based on Blunt’s home town of North Bay in North-East Ontario, some 330 kms north of Toronto. North Bay is on the Canadian Shield giving a distinctive landscape and on the shore of Lake Nipissing. The area is part of the homeland of the Nipissing First Nation of Ojibwe and Algonquin peoples and this is an important element in Blackfly Season.
The central character is John Cardinal (Billy Campbell), a Detective from the Algonquin Bay Police who in Season 1 returns from Toronto to re-open an old case. He is under a cloud of suspicion and it will turn out that his new partner Lise Delorme, a Québécoise played by Karin Vanasse, is also checking on Cardinal for an internal investigation. Cardinal’s wife Catherine has been suffering from a bi-polar disorder and in Season 2 it will emerge that she has something to do with the suspicions about Cardinal’s activities in Toronto. This set-up suggests a familiar generic device – the younger woman who is super-efficient is partnered with the older man who has all the problems associated with a sick wife (and feelings of responsibility for a daughter at university in Toronto). It’s summer in North Ontario and the blackfly are biting when Cardinal and Delorme are called to investigate the case of a young woman who has been shot in the woods. A bullet has lodged in the young woman’s skull but she has survived although she has lost all memories of how she got into the woods. Gradually it becomes clear that a new group of heroin dealers has moved into the region and are now competing with the established drugs network run by the Northern Raiders bikers’ gang. How does Red (the girl in the woods) fit in with the drugs war? And is she connected to what appears to be some form of ritual killing with a mutilated body found in a cave?
There are a number of elements in this series which interest me. Aesthetically Cardinal follows some of the familiar features of Nordic/North European noirs. There are aerial shots of forests and lakes stretching for miles as a lone vehicle follows a narrow road. This could easily be Sweden in summer. The music and sound mix (another factor sometimes making dialogue difficult to hear) is another reminder of The Swedish/Danish serial The Bridge with a title song recalling both The Bridge and the French serial Witnesses through its ethereal voice and strings. This song, ‘Familiar’, is by the Danish singer/composer Agnes Obel who has contributed songs to various TV productions in Germany, Australia, UK and US. Todor Kobakov is the composer of the overall score for the series. The Nordic connections do work with the summer landscape but are perhaps even closer in Season 1, set in the harsh winter and reminiscent of the Iceland of Trapped (2015).
The story in Season 2 has many familiar elements including the drugs war, questions about possible corruption in the police force and a killer with childhood memories that ‘return’ in unfortunate ways. The intriguing ‘difference’ is the setting in a region with First Nation peoples. The third member of the investigating team is Detective Jerry Commanda (Glen Gould) who is cast as what the character himself calls a ‘native’ police officer. Glen Gould is listed on Wikipedia as an ‘Aboriginal Canadian actor of Mi’kmaq and Italian descent’, born in Nova Scotia. I was intrigued to see also (via IMDb) a casting call for Season 1 of Cardinal in which roles were listed, specifying ‘Aboriginal Canadian’ roles and roles open to ‘all ethnicities’. Commanda uses the names of different First Nations as well as ‘native’ and also refers to various ‘res’ or First Nations reservations. I wish I knew more about recent Canadian debates about First Nations and I’m intrigued as to how First Nations issues are developed in film and TV narratives and how the Canadian approach compares with that in Australia and New Zealand as well as in Scandinavia with Sami peoples. I don’t want to say too much about how the narrative develops in Cardinal because it could spoil the viewing experience.
Cardinal seems to have gone down pretty well in Canada and it has been sold to Sweden, Spain, Germany, Australia and the US. I’ll certainly look out for Seasons 3 and 4 and I’m also now intrigued to read Giles Blunt’s novels. Here’s the Canadian trailer for Season 2:
The Case for Global Film 
I agree, for me the first episode was really strong and it drew me in straight away. Red was a really intriguing character. The acting is really understated in contrast to the horrific corpses which are quite visceral. Interesting that Ray North Wind was appropriating his name and cultural background for evil ends. The ending was very sad but not unexpected.
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