The Berlin crime scene “The Third Skin” addresses the dramatic rental situation in Berlin
At the wrong moment, even shaken to the core, you shouldn’t look at this crime scene. He is good and gloomy, and even if he gives badness a lot of space (more space than we have to live in, to name an example), the bottom line is a bitter look at some realities. “The third skin” means your own, specially rented four walls, another shell after body and clothing. It is just as existential, even if not everyone thinks about it every day.
The house in the film, handsome, good location, not renovated for a long time, is currently being “de-let”. Many are already gone. It’s a Berlin crime scene. Finding a new affordable apartment in Berlin: Difficult for those who don’t have a lot of money and therefore didn’t want / couldn’t move out yet. At the beginning there is an eviction, at the end there is an arrest that will not make the world a better place.
The landlord lies dead in front of the house the day after the eviction, and the remaining tenants find it difficult to look sad. But also his family comes into view, a bourgeois constellation that is controlled by a matriarch (Özay Fecht). The daughter (Sesede Terziyan) studied economics, but everything in business remained focused on the son, who is no longer alive. Turkish is rarely spoken here. The small family has laboriously worked its way up. The mother’s harshness is reflected in the daughter. Although the illegal and the legal are easy to distinguish, the legal is not necessarily good. Or obvious. To a music by Max van Dusen that does not downplay the tragic, Katrin Bühlig (book) and Norbert ter Hall (director) open the big barrel of justice in the face of unjust ownership. The evicted bus driver (Peter René Lüdicke) says: “I’ve worked all my life, I’m even systemically relevant and can no longer afford an apartment in Berlin.”
The hard-working intern in the homicide squad, Anna, has meanwhile set off for Bielefeld, a city that, from Berlin, seems particularly unreal. The replacement sticks to the working hours, that’s not for Karow, Mark Waschke, who wanders particularly restlessly and unfriendly through the episode. Rubin, on the other hand, Meret Becker, soon finds himself in a dementing scenario. The flickering of “The Third Skin” may have something to do with it. Instability everywhere. In a bizarre choreography, Karow tries out whether he could throw Rubin off the balcony. Afterwards there is an absurd, nervous sex scene. It speaks for Becker and Waschke that they can interest us in it themselves.
In general, there is no lack of atmosphere and social criticism and both at the same time. Applied too thick? Not really, given the situation. In fact, many people are not doing well in the film, and others can be seen very briefly and are quoted in one sentence in a semi-documentary manner. What they want, for example: to find an apartment again. Ms. Kirschner (Friederike Frerichs) also has to leave her apartment. Nobody in the film is interested in this except for the script and direction. And out here, not even the two of them are there when a person is freshly told in a youthful way that he is an “obstacle to exploitation”.
No Tatort has played so aggressively during the Corona crisis. Fascinating to see that it is not so easy to let the maximum topicality flow directly into a film. The handling of the masks, to which we have long since grown accustomed, appears strangely artificial in the film. Starting with the fact that the characters are apparently unable to speak a word with a mouth guard.
“Tatort: The Third Skin”, ARD, Sun., 8:15 pm.
