With a down-to-earth attitude and originality, the police call starts fresh for the anniversary “An der Saale hellem Strande”.
The writer Clemens Meyer, born in Halle an der Saale in 1977, wrote a down-to-earth and original screenplay for a “Polizeiruf 110” restart in Halle (which is also a 50th anniversary because the first police call ran in 1971 in the GDR) . This together with director Thomas Stuber, who and his team are not stingy when it comes to atmosphere and fine details. In a bar that seems smoky even though it can’t be smoky, Meyer gives the laconic landlord and pours the inspectors filter coffee, the sight of which shakes you. The MDR has also reactivated the rooms in which the Hallesche GDR police call was once filmed. From the desk drawer, Peter Kurth, as Chief Detective Henry Koitzsch, takes out a recording device, scratched and a mini-cassette. Oha.
You save all prefaces, explanations, introductions, commissioner character drawings in “An der Saale hellem Strande”. Henry and Michael “Michi” Lehmann, Peter Schneider, are not only long ago by you, they are also a visibly well-rehearsed team. Henry often drinks too much. Michi was – the information slips past without any consequences – a nurse, has a family and a father-in-law, the police officer was in the GDR. How did you actually do it? He can ask him now and then, fortunately the answers remain short.
Witnesses in the middle
Like their private lives, let’s call them Henry and Michi, their sensitivities are different. For the time being, traumas and over-the-top candidates don’t seem to be part of it. They always take witnesses to the center of their ruffled, but also intimate office. And in this first case, in which we are allowed to accompany you, we need to take a large number of witnesses into the middle. You are patient with this (mostly), but nothing seems to lead anywhere.
A man is murdered on his doorstep. Another man found a summons three months later in the mail, he is number 34 (!) In the cell evaluation – no, not “cell monitoring”, correct the commissioners – and is simply supposed to say why he was in on the night of the murder in question the street in question and who he spoke to on the phone there. And then please tell him why he no longer has his cell phone. The daughter threw it into the hall, he says – well, if that doesn’t sound super suspicious.
There are quite a few more or less suspects jumping around, each one drawn with a quick, but also fine line. The perky young woman, Cordelia Weg, who had three or four friends at the time of the murder and can no longer say who she was talking to on the phone. The old man, Hermann Beyer, he was on the train, could memorize all trains and timetables, now he forgets everything. A few residents have an electricity problem and soon another one. And Torsten Ranft, who as a very young actor played a child murderer in a police call (see the following documentation), was allowed to freak out briefly during the questioning.
Patina is on “An der Saale bright beach”, this is due to the furnishings, maybe also to subtitles such as “No day is like the other”. But it’s not a bit because of the story, which has a dash of sadness and a dash of black humor, which is by no means old-fashioned, but relies on guys and gobs, on quiet police work and perfect intermeshing. You dare to do something on the Saale, you also end up in such a way that it absolutely has to go on.
” Polizeiruf 110: An der Saale hellem Strande”, ARD, Sun., 8:15 pm.
