Felix Voss (Fabian Hinrichs), the inspector who always shines from the inside and firmly believes in the good in people, and his honey lady from the market: In his clumsy confidence, that was a seldom touching moment even for the most French, at least emotionally most sensitive edition of “Tatort “Series that the Franken team has stood for for six years.
What happened to the delicate honey band from the previous episode? "We are engaged," says Voss, which is a quiet joke that can only be understood by the fact that he is head over heels with a Bamberg teacher through a comment by his colleague Paula Ringelhahn (Dagmar Manzel) in love - feels kindly fooled. “That would be nice,” adds Voss afterwards, and there we have something like the leitmotif of the mostly elegant films about the Nuremberg investigators: a powerful subjunctive, but one that never seems completely unreachable.
Instead of the usual pathos of lone warriors and disaffected cynicism, here in the south (still) compassion, shyness, hope and basic trust in colleagues prevail. In the heart of Franconia, nothing but policemen of the heart, dreamy and approachable: Contrary to all expectations, it does not seem frumpy or obtrusive, but simply impressively honest. A nuanced performance is just as responsible for this as the authors' courage to allow themselves to be guided by the characters, not by the most blatant case drama or even by realism. This is particularly clear in the current book by Thomas Wendrich: It leads us alongside strong characters into a world of strong feelings. It will be extremely dark, which you may only be able to afford with such a human-friendly team behind you,without slipping into depression.
Wealthy father, irascible choleric
It is a world in which a wealthy father (Andreas Pietschmann) is at the same time an irascible choleric, whose wife (Linda Pöppel) who lives apart and who is not only despised as an opponent of vaccinations (Linda Pöppel), who lives apart, is initially shouted at with hatred because they are five years old Son has disappeared for three days (both thought he was with the other person) before she - the situation has got even worse - but comes back to him ("I love him").
That this father lives in a black box that has been left unfinished with concrete inside, an architect Kaprice, can be understood as symbolic as it looks. Voss, who sees the child he was sitting around in the form of the missing boy, can well understand being afraid of the violent father. And there is someone else who is afraid, even as far as Amsterdam: Titus (Simon Frühwirth), a teenager who is apparently suffering from psychosis. We do not know for a long time whether and to what extent his belief in persecution is justified. His overwhelmed, assaulting mother (Bettina Hoppe) soon gets the boy out of the clinic where the police brought him after a breakdown.
Director Andreas Kleinert engages so deeply with the characters portrayed from intimate proximity that we not only look at what is happening with Voss 'eyes, but also experience Ringelhahn's anticipating worries as an alleged real action or see maggots crawling through professor's beards in Titus' mad perspective. The ontological status of Titus' friend Coco (Michelle Barthel) is at least sensitive. For the role of Ringelhahn-lover Rolf, the third and most important storyline, none other than the famous Sylvester Groth was engaged. He succeeds in embodying the plot, which is not particularly convincing from a narrative point of view, but which is to be seen primarily thetically - a maximally exaggerated trust dilemma - with so much dignity and grace that the strange coincidence,that, of all things, the detective's lover moves into the center of the action, hardly looks offensive.
Two abuse investigations are underway against the released teacher, as Voss tells the colleague, who is soon torn between disbelief and mistrust. After all, the missing boy lived not far away.
What Wendrich and Kleinert set in motion with the help of Michael Hammon's never hectic, but always dynamic camera, is something like a complex mechanism of the tragic, a clockwork of misunderstandings, fears, breaches of trust and good intentions turning into their opposite There are no simple conditional relationships between causes and effects, but rather accidental conjunctives, and yet this makes the pointer mercilessly tick in the direction of catastrophe. What is shown is not necessarily reliable, but what is depressing comes mainly from what is left out, from childish, nightmarish anticipation that disappears in the overdriven white of a sanatorium or in the darkness of a cellar.
The picture of society that this melancholy, aesthetically convincing “Tatort” paints with its great will to style is intentionally incomplete.
And it is the gaps in which the devil lurks.
It's less about guilt because it is so widely distributed.
Rather, despite all the fateful tragedy, the film quietly suggests how nice it would be if we helped each other over such pitfalls.
But how does love fare in the fragile world?
Not all bad.
That makes it particularly worth seeing.
The Crime Scene: Where's Mike?
runs this Sunday at 8.15 p.m. in the first.