The Munich “Crime Scene: The Desire” | EUROtoday

Anyone who’s used to poor high quality shortly tends to suppose that what’s satisfactory is excellent. For instance at “Tatort”. The Munich episode entitled “The Desire” is a presentable chamber play by ARD requirements, nothing extra. But as a result of the newest episodes (for instance Stuttgart and Berlin) are nonetheless having an impression, we’re ready to provide extra reward right here than is suitable.

The case in short: During a efficiency of Anton Chekhov’s “Seagull” on the Residenztheater, the actress Nora Nielsen (Giulia Goldammer) collapses useless on the open stage. Overdose. Tilidine. Probably homicide. The following applies to the ensemble colleagues: one is extra suspicious than the opposite. The investigation is carried out the best way Aristotle would have appreciated it – sustaining the unity of place, time and motion. So ninety minutes within the theater.

That would after all be one thing for the college seminar, as would the truth that actors who embody movie characters are always speaking about different movie characters embodied by actors, who in flip are theater actors within the movie, the “Tatort”, and theater and movie actors in actual life. The inspectors Ivo Batic (Miroslav Nemec), Franz Leitmayr (Udo Wachtveitl) and their sidekick Kalli Hammermann (Ferdinand Hofer) not solely observe how issues develop backstage. One will get the impression that they’re watching one another, which ought to get Luhmann readers excited.

In different phrases, it’s refined and postmodern. Director Andreas Kleinert and his screenwriters Norbert Baumgarten and Holger Joos are clearly completely happy about their concepts, and one has to provide them credit score for the truth that they hardly go overboard. Sometimes, for instance, it isn’t totally clear whether or not the theater actors’ speech is addressed to the investigators or whether or not it’s a quote from “The Seagull” – an apparent, however well-dosed irritant right here.

The dialogues are additionally humorous. Batic: “I once had a friend who wanted to become an actress.” Ensemble member Gina Rohland (primarily based on Gena Rowlands, performed by Ursina Lardi): “And?” Batic: “She’s a physiotherapist today.” In the following scene Leitmayr: “Actors, huh? They earn their money by telling you stories… I knew one too, I hope I never see her again.” Batic: “He probably feels the same way.” Leitmayr: “She wasn’t actually a real actress, she just did television.”

The commissioners do not have a straightforward job. It takes greater than ten minutes for them to look for the primary time, and the best way they push open the large theater door to greet them offers a foretaste of the investigation. As tiny detectives, they stand in a darkish corridor that appears to swallow them entire. As quickly because the door creaks shut behind the 2 of them, the viewer thinks: Oh, oh, now it is getting critical.

In truth, the “crime scene” is a zone freed from slapstick, however not irony, it exhibits ethical failure, however doesn’t wish to be an ethical establishment, it revolves across the confusion of regular human interplay, however doesn’t dictate our perspective in direction of it. Despite all this, the theater seems to be as complicated because the case itself. Batic and Leitmayr, who all the time look somewhat served and are surrounded by an aura of comedy that may by no means be shaken, wander by the constructing as if it had been a labyrinth (“Who built this theater? Kafka?”). This suits with the plot, which adheres to the conventions of “whodunit” and divulges an more and more sophisticated internet of vanities, chicanery, affairs, jealousy, envy and aggressive strain.

The theater clichés used typically appear cliché, however are positioned exactly, for instance when director Akim Birol (Thiemo Strutzenberger) has a scene rehearsed after which says: “I’m not feeling it.” Small argument. Then Carl Silbermann (Lukas T. Sperber): “You’re only here at the big house because you’re gay. And a Turk.” Leitmayr elsewhere: “We are here at the theater, everyone has something to do with everyone else.”

The closing and climax is a twelve-minute reveal scene on stage. Who did what and why? And what does this all should do with the suicide of an actress in the identical home six months in the past? You cannot match extra Agatha Christie right into a “crime scene”. “The Desire” is formally the 97th case for the Munich investigators. Due to a commerce he’s broadcast as quantity 98. The farewell will observe subsequent 12 months within the type of a double episode, and individuals are already getting ready for it. After half an hour, a member of the ensemble performed by Robert Kuchenbuch says to Leitmayr: “If you stop looking for murderers at some point, someone else will do it, and no one will care.” Finally, he considered it once more: “Maybe people will miss you when you’re no longer there at some point.”

The Crime Scene: Desire runs on Boxing Day, Friday, December twenty sixth, at 8:15 p.m. on the First.