In the new “Tatort” in Frankfurt, the investigators have to work through a novel in order to get to the bottom of the crime.
Frankfurt / Main – If that’s not the timing: The new “Tatort” of the Hessischer Rundfunk will deal with the literature business immediately after the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The Frankfurt commissioners Anna Janneke (Margarita Broich) and Paul Brix (Wolfram Koch) are investigating the death of 19-year-old young author Luise Nathan (Jana McKinnon, “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo”) in their latest case. At first everything looks like a suicide. Could the young woman not withstand the pressure to succeed? Has she possibly announced her own departure in her video statement about her character Luna?
“Luna eats or dies” (Sunday, 8.15 p.m., Das Erste) is the name of the 14th case by the Frankfurt team of investigators. The director was Katharina Bischof, who – together with Johanna Thalmann – also wrote the script. What is truth, what is reality? This is what the audience at this “crime scene” has to ask, just like the investigators.
Like visions, the real film plot is mixed with visions from the book. But what of this comes from Luise’s fantasy, and where does her lyrics deal with what actually happened? What does the privileged young woman have in common with the fictional character Luna and her rough and serene manner? This question becomes more important when it turns out that the author died as a result of massive outside influences.
The young woman’s book, which was eagerly awaited, is about Luna, a teenage girl who grows up in precarious circumstances, whose mother is already overwhelmed with herself and does not even manage to get food regularly. A life that is so very different from that of Luise, whose mother is a councilor for social affairs and is committed to a café for socially disadvantaged people.
Luise’s girlfriend Nellie (Lena Urzendowsky, “How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)”) is one of those who work at “Café Kelle”. She knows the world that Luise describes in the novel. Her single mother is emotionally unstable, and it’s Nellie who mostly takes care of her little sister. Has Luise “appropriated” Nellie’s life for her novel and thereby betrayed the friendship? Is that why the relationship between friends has cooled down? And what role does the relationship between mothers play? Nellie’s mother has reacted to Luise’s mother like an unwanted rival since she suggested a boarding scholarship for the talented young woman.
Brix and Janneke first start reading Luise’s novel out of thoroughness. But more and more “Luna” casts a spell over her. At times the police station becomes a reading circle in which people consider together: Where does fiction end and where are the keys to real events? The viewer often already knows more than the investigator. The search for clues takes place not only at the crime scene, but also on the book pages.
Frankfurt is not only the city of the book fair and the banks, but, like many large cities, a city of great social contrasts. In this “crime scene”, this is also evident in the change of location between the concrete ghetto and the educated bourgeois apartment in an old building. In fact, there hasn’t been so much Frankfurt to be seen in a Frankfurt “crime scene” for a long time.
“On the one hand, we wanted to do justice to the pressing issue of the great social gap in Germany,” said director Bischof about her crime thriller. “On the other hand, there was the danger of using the real suffering of actual people as a pure plot of a fictional narrative.” That turned the work into a cinematic tightrope walk. dpa
