What an idyll: sunshine plays around the green of the vine, father and daughter climb into the vineyard to taste the berries before the upcoming harvest.
The sugar is right, the kernels loosen from the fruit juicy, the South Tyrolean winemaker Matteo DeCanin (Tobias Moretti) can be proud and full of hope: of the new vintage in the barrels and the next generation, in the form of his daughter Laura (Tobias Morettis Daughter Antonia Moretti) will continue to run the family business.
This is not about any good, but a traditional, award-winning top establishment, a château straight out of a picture book, with a queen - DeCanin's wife Stefania (Ursina Lardi) -, a king and a princess.
Ursula Scheer
Editor in the features section.
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If it weren't for this man who keeps standing in the courtyard with his legs apart, staring at the winemaker, disappears and returns, always a little closer, always a little more threatening. And if it weren't for the intro that the director Andreas Prochaska (with Ben von Rönne also screenwriter) prefers the excursion into the ideal world of viticulture: In the night and in the fog, young African women run for their lives between rows of vines, shots are fired, blood flows, red like the wine that DeCanin and his cellar master (Gerhard Liebmann) develop to the sound of classical music. The bright light in which DeCanin is still sunbathing will be captured by the darkness, of which the darkening images of the cameraman Thomas W. Kiennast leave no doubt long before something bad happens. Matteo DeCanin is trapped "in the web of the Camorra".
Ideal family and beautiful surroundings?
The two-parter of the same name on ZDF lets loose on an intact family in beautiful surroundings, as you can best imagine in an early evening series, characters who could also find a home in a mafia series like "Camorra". The whole thing is vaulted by the investigations of a carabinier named Adrin Erlacher (Harald Windisch), who seems to have emerged from an ORF “country crime thriller”. One might think that this is a weird cut. But the concept works surprisingly well: “Im Netz der Camorra” is actually a thriller that effectively smashes the “Commissario Brunetti” comfort of countless foreign crime stories from German television. The credible, multilingual,A multidialect and international cast, including Fabrizio Romagnoli as Mafioso Nino Sorrentino and Precious Mariam Sanusi as Akua Mbaye, a witness protected by Erlacher with great personal commitment, contributes to this.
Prochaska is not afraid to repeatedly use subtitles where others would switch to German after a prop-like “Ciao”. It would have been even more consistent not to Germanize conversational situations that, according to the stories of the characters, should actually take place in Neapolitan. But Tobias Moretti doesn't really make DeCanin look like she comes from the deepest south, despite all the nuance that he ascribes to his ambiguous figure. That's okay, as Moretti plays half an Austrian and, for the sake of camouflage, perfectly acculturated in South Tyrol, who has taken his wife's name and hides a past in Campania. Now she is catching up with him with all the brutality Camorristi are capable of.
It's about wine adulteration for China on a large scale, but actually about a perfidious power game with which a renegade is to be punished, tortured, blackmailed and, in the end, perhaps brought to death. After cultivated sipping from long-stemmed glasses, the shock is only greater when a skull is knocked in, corpses are disposed of or methods of murder are verbally called in a final orgy of roaring that otherwise have no place in public television films.
“In the web of the Camorra” is still no gimmicky slaughter.
Prochaska, supported by the threatening music of Stefan Bernheimer, leads his characters calmly and deliberately into ruin, leaving them room for reflection and development.
Harald Windisch impressively embodies the policeman as a good person on whom the limitations of his power also seem to weigh physically.
Ursula Lardi shows DeCanin's wife sensitively between disgust, loyalty and the courage to die.
Antonia Moretti plays in the finals as a young woman in an extreme situation.
But the end alone seems strangely tacked on, like an epilogue that demands less of the audience than the emotional wine press before.
It leaves the way to a possible sequel open.
On the Camorra network
, today and on Tuesday, at 8:15 p.m. on ZDF