A "crime scene" for art, that could be interesting.
The prerequisite would be that the screenplay has made some original thoughts about its motives.
However, this is not the case in the new Swiss “Tatort: Schattenkinder”.
Veiling as in Christo and Jeanne Claude, formaldehyde-soaked provocation according to Damien Hirst, video art from yesterday and well-known market price gouging through the destruction of objects, connected by the central motif from Franz Kafka's story "In the Penal Colony": In "Schattenkinder" everything is messed up that to portray the charismatic artist as a shock rebel.
Provided with all sorts of aura murmurs and Simon Guy Fässler's pictures of Zurich gloom, the screenplay by Stefanie Veith and Nina Vukovic also claims to criticize the profession of gallery owner.
In this story, its representatives are creatively drained and powerless and consider dehumanization to be fine art that can be placed at the Biennale.
Does this starting position hold tension?
It would be possible that a number of “Tatort” fans would already switch off during the performative opening sequences, in which young people are laboriously shaved bald, as a kind of initiation of their transformation into works of art.
radical niche
The third assignment of the new Zurich team of Tessa Ott (Carol Schuler) and Isabelle Grandjean (Anna Pieri Zuercher) is expressly about "transformations of pain" and thus in particular about the transformator Kyomi (Sara Hostettler), who after rather humble beginnings as a conceptual artist has found a lucrative, radical niche.
In Zurich she lives and works in a kind of artist collective with Cosmo (Vincent Furrer), Indira (Zoe Valks) and Shin (Tim Borys), who have stripped off their identities and made their entire skin available as a tattoo surface, including eyeballs, which gives them a alien-like appearance.
Kyomi is on the verge of a big breakthrough, with collectors bidding each other to be in the announced finale of Kyomi's promotions.
When Cosmo aka Max is discovered by his father Beat (Imanuel Humm), a cosmetic surgeon of all people, as a bloodless work piece in a cocoon cover in a gallery factory hall, Kyomi and her co-workers become the focus of the unequal investigators, who slowly come a little closer. while treating their assistant Noah Lionheart (Aaron Arens) as a mere errand boy for internet research.
Lionheart finds out some things, while Ott turns her intuition to Kyomi and Grandjean prefers fact-checking.
All three of Kyomi's "objects" suffer from traumatizing youth experiences and longing for death.
Max and a childhood friend were abused by a swimming coach.
The friend testified at the trial, Max did not.
It took several attempts before the man was convicted, who then spent a long time in prison and has now gone into hiding with a new identity.
The perpetrator Konrad Fassbind (Marcus Mislin) is now demented, but his victim was allowed to forget - until Kyomi promised not only to forget, but above all to transform.
The policewomen realize later that they too are being filmed, serving as performance areas in a live-streamed video installation.
Director Christine Repond makes the best of the depressing mood in the production,
which runs through the "Schattenkinder" to the contrastingly overexposed fire magic finale on an island in Lake Zurich.
The only one who cleverly pulls out of the affair in the end is gallery owner Bruno Escher (Fabian Krüger).
For other perpetrators and victims, as usual, the family is identified as the trigger.
Did someone say sublimation?
The crime scene: Schattenkinder runs on Sunday at 8:15 p.m. in the first.