In 1981, Labor's Odvar Nordli was forced to resign as prime minister after it was revealed that he had health problems. King Olaf V asked Gro Harlem Brundtland, of the same left-wing party, to form a government. She thus became the first woman to hold office in the history of the country. One imagines a series of protests around this figure: how a doctor and activist for the right to abortion came to power in a patriarchal system.
However, Power Play, which Filmin releases today, cannot be described in such a simplistic way. Screenwriter Johan Fasting, who was not even born when he got the job, asked himself the following questions: “What could be interesting for our generation or for people outside Norway? What makes this story relevant?” What he has constructed is a story about the fall of the Labor Party that serves as an example of the decline of the left and social democracy worldwide.
The series begins in 1974 with Brundtland in court to decide whether a young woman qualifies to terminate a pregnancy. She despairs when she sees that her male colleagues will override the patient's will. When the Labor Party knocks on her door to offer her the Environment Ministry, she agrees to enter the political game.
She soon realizes that it is enough to witness the internal struggles and ineptitude of her colleagues to acquire a more prominent role in the organization: “She watches and it is the others who are involved in the drama. If you were to tell only Gro's story, she would be very boring. You should tell another era of hers, since in the beginning she is still and waits.”
The script does not expressly address her condition as a woman in a man's world, despite it being one of the leitmotivs of the series. “It was a very conscious decision,” explains Fasting, who before writing Power Play, had signed Home Ground, a series about the first woman to coach a men's soccer team. There she did develop the speech in a more direct style.
“Since then, many series have been made that are vocally feminist, that have great lessons and that try to teach the audience something about feminism, but now they can speak implicitly because the audience is already used to having these conversations on a social level” , defends.
In fact, Fasting does not hide that it understands television fiction as a political art, to the extent that it portrays the moral decline of socialist parties from the left. “In the 1970s and 1980s, capitalist policies became very popular, as demonstrated by Thatcher in the United Kingdom or Reagan in the United States,” she argues.
In his opinion, as if right-wing policies were synonymous with modernity, left-wing parties moved to the right, becoming more conservative. “They should have stayed on the left, allowed themselves to be faithful to their principles and weather the storm: so now at least they would still have the principles and the ideology,” he laments.
