"Tatort" from Frankfurt: Is it literature or murder?

Younger, more diverse, linguistically as if vomited! And no blog or podcast or TikTok video, but a real book! One thing is certain: it sells. In the context of what the publishing industry now thinks of sliced ​​bread. For the Frankfurt niche publisher Roland Häbler (Clemens Schick), for whom every project is a bet on the continued existence of the printed matter, and its editor Marvin Gess (Thomas Prenn), the new publication, “Luna eats or dies”, is doing excellently. In the literary video blogs there is talk of a "declaration of war" to the establishment. The book-buying establishment likes to read accounts of this kind.

PR-technically almost even better: The nineteen-year-old author Luise Nathan (Jana McKinnon), daughter of the well-networked Frankfurt social affairs officer Friederike Nathan (Nicole Marischka), from an educated middle-class family and correspondingly confidently appearing in public, could already look like a sister of Luisa Neubauer and Helene Hegemann hold.

More bam!

hardly works.

Of course, Häbler had to bury his dreams of the repeated furore on the book market the morning after the book release party.

Perhaps, as an intellectual person, he should have thought more about the difference between role prose and auto-fiction and better protected his unstable young star from himself.

In any case, the author has put an end to her life by hand.

Just like described in her alter ego novel.

Was it the pressure?

You don't know where he's going

That sounds like a criticism of the Frankfurt company in crime disguise, but concern about the book medium is by no means the concern of the new HR “crime scene”.

Here and there you allow yourself a sottise (“Certainly not the only debutante with relationships”), but the goal of the fourteenth investigation by Anna Janneke (Margarita Broich) and Paul Brix (Wolfram Koch) with their assistant Jonas (Isaak Dentler) is a bit nebulous, but in a closer look about three times different.

On the one hand, "Luna eats or dies" is ambitious for art in the direction of metafiction, that's where the film weakens the most, on the other hand, it moves around a girl friendship while observing, that was not bad at all, and finally it struggles towards social criticism and inequality of opportunity, there he is flat.

The commissioners are just giving cues and must ensure that the action goes ahead (direction and script by Katharina Bischof, book by Johanna Thalmann).

The commissioners as literary critics

The idea: In order to track down Luise's murderer (it was by no means a suicide), the police officers have to act as literary interpreters. Now, literary criticism is a special profession, as her assistant also learns when all three of them bend over the work of the dead in a cozy scene in the presidium, look into each other's perplexed faces and finally look for traces of reality in a severely underprivileged adolescent story. After all, according to the long dead poet, fiction is “the invention of what is found”.

The camera picks up the idea and lets the scenery of the printed word become a cinematic insert over and over again. Whenever Luise sends her angry, starving, freezing novel self, which she calls "Luna", into situations of hopelessness, this "crime scene" reenacts this "Luna" with Luise's character. So that one can clearly understand that this is a film-within-a-film metafiction, the “crime scene” bathes these scenes in pink light (camera Julia Daschner). Later he also shows "Luna" as Nellie Kunze (Lena Urzendowsky), Luise's former best friend, who lives with her single mother Jessie (Tinka Fürst) and her little sister in a high-rise apartment from time to time in front of the door Time the ex-stepfather rages.

Who is who now? Who does the stuff of Nellie's life belong to? Is the social affairs officer involved in the disadvantaged café project “Die Kelle” (based on the “Arche” to some extent) for image reasons? Does literature lie? These are such questions. If this “crime scene” were told in more sophisticated arcs of tension and with more fictional ambiguity instead of assertion, it would have been able to do justice to its approach.

As it is, however, it is a rather clumsy, and also artificially naive, affair.

The commissioners must first find out with a frown, constantly questioning and constantly puzzling around, that not everything that is written in novels is one-to-one.

Jana McKinnon and Lena Urzendowsky, on the other hand, play the fiction of friendship beautifully light and convincing (as recently together in the Amazon series “We children from Bahnhof Zoo”).

But that does not tear the film "Luna Eats or Dies" out.

The

runs on Sunday at 8.15 p.m. in the first.