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Liv Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) and Linda Selb (Luise Wolfram): Proles against wannabe pianists

Photo: Claudia Konerding / Radio Bremen

She comes from the block, she knows her enemies. Liv Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), an inspector with a background in prefabricated construction, stands in front of the tasteful old building and tries to get a glimpse of the mezzanine floor. She excitedly turns to her colleague Linda Selb (Luise Wolfram) and drools: "Bet there's a piano in there too?" Of course she's right and cheers: "Ha, I knew it, there's a piano in there too! What is it with the people of Schwachhausen and their pianos? Why do they all have one? They're not all pianists.«

So classism goes in the opposite direction: it is not the higher earner who rises above those who receive public benefits, but rather the proletarian over the would-be musicians.

Between organic sausage and piano lessons

Bremen-Schwachhausen is the perfect environment to ignite the arrogance of Bremerhaven's social housing brute Moormann: People live here in pretty Art Nouveau villas and, as monument conservators and doctors, can help each other with house renovations or ailments when they are not eating organic sausages on their spacious terraces have a barbecue or beat their children to piano lessons.

The scene in which Moormann indulges in her fury of contempt is also so wonderful because it works on two levels: it captures the displayed sophistication of the lower academic upper class - and at the same time takes a critical look at this exhibited sophistication.

Unfortunately, it is the only wonderful scene in this “crime scene”. Instead of penetrating deeper into the real or fake Art Nouveau idyll, the filmmakers relocate the action to the grove of a forest beyond the city limits. Three mothers from Schwachhausen (including Pegah Ferydoni) were abandoned here, only with a compass and apparently without a cell phone, because they wanted to test whether their children could be expected to go on such a survival trip for self-training.

36 hours until death

On the second day, one of the mothers - with drug residue in her blood - lay drowned in a puddle. Have old scores been settled here that stem from the supposedly careful handling in Schwachhausen?

Author Kirsten Peters and director Leah Striker have built their investigative crime novel ambitiously: on one level they tell of the investigative work of the two detectives, on the other they count down the 36 hours of the mothers in the forest up to the minute of death in short chapters.

A forest like a fair

The problem is that the strict plot is repeatedly undermined by the filmmakers sending a number of other characters from the Schwachhausen environment into the dark woods at will: a husband who has an affair with another mother. The mothers' children, who in turn observe the secret lovers. A psychopath who lurks in the thicket. And of course cell phones were also smuggled into the forest against all agreements.

Soon the supposedly lonely wilderness is swarming and buzzing like a fair.

And in the commotion and noise far from the city, all the pettiness and dependencies with which Schwachhausen's affluent citizens make their lives in the Art Nouveau paradise hell become apparent. No one here is immune from social Darwinism. Educated, mindful, antisocial - that's how they all are.

Rating:

3 out of 10 points

“Crime Scene: Fear in the Dark”,

Easter Monday (!), 8:15 p.m., Das Erste