The crime scene “masks” stacks clichés, serves our favorite prejudices, and yet is also unique and attractive.
The crime scene “masks” is a wild ride through diverse emotional universes, served tartly in Dortmund style and occasionally put on for jokes. Unmoved, they fall close to an abyss of sadness. It also seems to be an advantage that while those experienced in crime will guess right with an 85 percent hit rate, they still have to wait a long time for the essential information about why it happened this way. But then it is a disadvantage, because here it leads to a clarification of the variety: Really now?
It is definitely an advantage to be interested in the nasty scene of the “pick-up artists”, men who show off to each other that they have slept lovelessly with as many women as possible, and of course one is very interested in it. Rolling eyes, disgusted, clear, but also with the pleasure that it always gives when prejudices for which one is rightly ashamed – here: the prejudice that is easy to refute in normal life that some men are not the brightest – just do it be fully confirmed.
In a corresponding course (for the quick conquest of women, because “the lion eats when he is hungry”), Faber and Bönisch, Jörg Hartmann and Anna Schudt research incognito, but aggressively. As a result, both are engaged differently in their private lives anyway. Sex and Crime in Dortmund. It’s nice to see the police staring helplessly and listlessly at the boring sex evidence videos of a “pick-up artist”. The book by Arnd Mayer and Claudia Matschulla can concentrate most convincingly on this topic, while everything else occurs. Ayse Polat’s direction copes with the laconic tone that prevails among the Dortmund police in an extremely convincing manner.
But it starts quite differently. A jogger is run over, a patrol officer with a pregnant wife and an office that stands behind him for the first quarter of an hour. Anne Ratte-Polle is the boss here, who as an actress immediately turns the story into complexities and, as a film character, knows Bönisch from earlier times. Michelle Barthel is her sobbing daughter, also a policewoman, Jonas Friedrich Leonhardi is the colleague who was very good friends with the dead man and who has known the widow for ages, Kyra Sophia Kahre. It still looks clear there.
In a classic Dortmund tumbling motion that seems hopelessly inefficient, but works, Faber and Bönisch move half privatizing, half working and in any case always as if only half attentive through what is happening. Those who joined later, Rick Okon as Pawlak and recently Stefanie Reinsperger as Rosa Herzog, are on the other hand. How Rosa Herzog, who is the only one generally mentioned by the beautiful first name, brings a normality into play – a clear address above all, which also suddenly makes Pawlak the most normal disturbed person in the world – which the Dortmund crime scene did not know before .
That Rosa gets along brilliantly even with Pawlak’s lonely child is probably what is called a touch too much (but Reinsperger doesn’t play it too much). In general, “masks” strangely works off of motherhood and motherhood stereotypes, while the fear of emasculation by feminism slumbers in the struggling rippers, no, yaps.
The clarification at the end also piles up another cliché with each further explanation. That is precisely what makes this round a triumph for Faber and Bönisch, who can be criticized for a lot, but not in a drawer format.
“Tatort: Masken”, ARD, Sun., 8:15 pm.
