The ZDF has launched a new Saturday crime series, it is called "Colleagues" and brings the actresses Caroline Peters and Natalia Belitski as a new detective duo in a situation that is as complicated as it is constructed: Julia Jungklausen (Belitski) is with Hans (Götz Schubert), the public prosecutor together, from whom Irene Gaup (Peters) just separated.
Now the two commissioners are supposed to solve the murder of an eighteen-year-old whose body was found near a self-sufficient farm where “urban-weary, meaning-seeking and post-capitalist utopians” let a horse shaman show them the right way.
Axel Weidemann
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Things are colorful in this new ZDF thriller, but that doesn't detract from the viewer's curiosity at first thanks to the well-done oddball supporting characters. Irene Gaup is missing right at the beginning and everything that leads to this is told by Vanessa Jopp (director) and Anette Simon (script) in a long flashback. It's nice that the film begins "jwd" and not straight away in Berlin, because Jungklausen, who previously worked in Leipzig, still needs some time to get used to it. When it comes to self-sufficiency - "it's a sect" - she offends: "I'm not allowed to eat grain ... and no lactose." And she would also prefer to avoid delivering the death message to the victim's mother.
At the beginning - words, actions and attitudes (camera Hans Fromm) leave little doubt - the sympathies are clearly on the side of Gaup, who initially does not know that her husband ("we are not divorced yet") is with her colleague .
Irene Gaup has a knack for other colleagues and potential witnesses, is natural and vulnerable, takes time for the victim's mother and prepares her stepson home-made ravioli after work - at least that's what she tells Hans.
Jungklausen, on the other hand, is always dressed a bit too smartly, ticks around on her cell phone too often and – a sign of the greatest possible restlessness – always drives around with a bunch of empty 0.5-liter energy drink cans in her Mini.
An elephant in the room that goes by the name of Hans
Irene Gaup associates the victim's necklace with an old case that, like the associated trauma, has never left her. A young woman named Emma Lennartz (Emilie Neumeister), who disappeared with her newborn daughter four years ago, appears to have something to do with the murder. For the suspects who come through the door one after the other - the shaman Keanu (Marek Harloff), the yard mother and former criminal defense attorney Gudrun (Karoline Eichhorn), Emma's stepfather Karl (Hendrik Heutmann) and her therapist, who seems to have been pulled out of a hat Prof. Dr. Helmholdt (Helmut Mosshammer) - is not interested in the first "colleague" episode "Das Böse Kind" or in the case itself. In the foreground is Irene Gaup's emotional involvement in the case and the elephant in the room,who goes by the name of Hans.
And despite this constructed tense situation, which would have given rise to many bad German TV sentences and jokes, the ensemble, led by Vanessa Jopp, manages to avoid the explanatory loquacity that is always characteristic of many crime novels.
Scenes in which one tough saying normally provokes the next, sometimes simply remain open.
On the image level, the scenes are resolved conventionally.
But there is also the courage to leave things out and dare to take bigger leaps.
Then the suspect who just fled is suddenly found without showing the audience how.
Most of the time this works well, only sometimes the characters appear very abruptly.
On the part of the colleagues, on the other hand, the viewer can observe quite precisely how their inner life changes with the light conditions.
Unfortunately, the film loses its natural charm towards the end and gives up clever restraint in favor of narrative contrasts and a good portion of melodrama.
Finally, a woman sits under a sacred tree and has to find herself again.
You also trust the “colleagues” to do that.
They convince because they don't always have to prove their toughness to themselves, their male colleagues or the audience.
Colleagues - The bad child
, 8:15 p.m., ZDF.