This is known from Hollywood. Sometimes, two films come to the cinemas in quick succession, which have the same theme. The two "Robin Hood" versions of 1991, for example, or two Truman Capote biopics in 2006. A similar phenomenon can now be observed on ARD and ZDF: The channels show two films on the topic of clan crime, at a distance of only four days. The ZDF presented on Monday with "Against the fear" before, now follows the ARD thriller "The Order".
Actually, it is always the case that at the end of one of the two films is the winner of the place. Who was the definitive Robin Hood of the 90's? Kevin Costner, who still remembers Patrick Bergin? And who was remembered as Capote? Of course Philip Seymour Hoffman, not Toby Jones. The clash of clan films, however, is no clear winner. In their approach very different, they are all the more similar in one point: the ignorance of their topic.
One could look at both in a row ("Against the fear" is still in the ZDF-Mediathek until 21.6.) And would have learned nothing about families who immigrated decades ago to Germany and built here small empires, where not the German state enforced the law, but criminal grandfathers, fathers, uncles, cousins. The disinterest in these people and their history, which favored their machinations first, it continues in these two films.
In "Against Fear," depoliticization expressed itself in a soap operatic plot; In "The Order" by director Florian Baxmeyer and screenwriter Karsten Schmidt criminal clan members are pushed even more to the brink of narration. Here they are just more chimeras or, better yet: action-driving elements. They serve to threaten the central figures and set in motion a sinister thriller mechanism. "Either they are called Ahmed or Mohammed - you never know who you're talking about," says a LKA official here. The rest of the movie does not want to know much more exactly.
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"The Order": At the edge of the narrativeThis is why the centerpiece of the story is also the bodyguard Sarah Brandt (Anna Bederke), who is confronted with a dramatic case on her first assignment for the State Office of Criminal Investigation in Berlin. 16-year-old Miki (Aaron Hilmer) has witnessed the murder of a spy the LKA wanted to install in the Sayed clan. The teenager wants to testify against the gangster boss Ahmed Sayed (Timur Isik) and now floats in acute danger. Therefore, he is brought together with his divorced parents (Anja Kling, Gregor Bloéb) in the vicinity of Rome, where a mixed German-Italian team to protect him from attacks by criminals.
Which, of course, following the laws of the genre, more bad than good: soon, two officials are dead and the family lands heavily injured back in Germany. The Sayed clan is not joking, and it takes some more surprising plot twists, until Sarah Brandt with her alcoholic colleague Lobeck (great laconic: Oliver Masucci) has localized the leak that provides the criminals with information.
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Above all in the last third, "Der Auftrag" is an exciting thriller that is heading for a drastic, gritty and abysmal finale. In view of the Sayeds, however, there is a questionable inaccuracy. The film does not show a real milieu, it does not critically place the business of the criminals and their consequences. Instead, the script reduces the immigrants to classic movie villains, and it works with classic stereotypes of film history, which are quite racially primed. Oriental wisdom may be used to bestow and deliver perfidious threats, roll a frightening eye and speak the most vulgar German possible. A story of their own, but the script does not admit it to them.
Members of criminal extended families are here and in the ZDF counterpart "Against the fear" the others, the foreigners, the unknown immigrants. A little more will to differentiation should actually be trusted in public productions. The German television was finally on, see "4 blocks".
"The order" . March 30, ARD, 8:15 pm