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Peter Kurth as Inspector Koitzsch: »Porn magazine in the bathroom.
Very harmless. "
Photo: Felix Abrah / MDR
What is left of life when the police look around a murder victim's apartment?
"Porn magazine in the bathroom," says the inspector into his dictaphone.
Then he leafed through the notebook and added in a connoisseur's tone: "Well, rather harmless." Finally he went into the bedroom, sat down on the bed and rocked until the steel springs creak.
Another connoisseur's tone: “He slept here alone.
Night for night."
Impertinence and voyeurism are considered occupational diseases among investigators.
Chief Inspector Henry Koitzsch (Peter Kurth) indulges in both of these almost voluptuously while viewing the apartment.
He has nothing else - except his alcoholism and a few old brothel acquaintances.
Koitzsch, in his late 50s, is an old-school investigator wolf.
During his research on site, he speaks into an ancient device with a cassette operation;
the office in Halle an der Saale, in which he sits with his colleague Michael Lehmann (Peter Schneider), in his late 40s, is furnished in the pre-turn style.
You think you can smell the filter coffee.
The boomers are back.
Last week, Radio Bremen sent a “Tatort” team between their early 30s and early 40s to the start, the new “Police Call” from Halle relies on the previous cohorts.
That is also a statement.
Especially since this "police call" is a special one: it celebrates the 50th anniversary of the classic crime thriller, which originated on GDR television.
At the time, it was intended as an answer to the »crime scene«, which had started a year earlier and was also very popular in the East.
Eastern stars included
One year after the »crime scene«, the »police call« is celebrating its anniversary.
And it is remarkable how any fidgeting of the zeitgeist is avoided here.
Instead, those responsible get from the depths of the story to a partly breathtaking new draft of the Eastern classic, including Eastern biographies and Eastern stars.
And it works like this: The murder victim was stabbed to death right on the doorstep, and because there are no witnesses, the commissioners call in a colorful bunch of people to question who were nearby at the time of the crime.
Radio cell evaluation makes it possible.
How at this point the rustic authority setting suddenly opens up, and how we dive into their biographies from the stories of the various witnesses, has seldom been seen before in a television thriller: We are mistaken about nighttime with a retired railroad worker (Hermann Beyer) Tracks and listen to a record with him, on which the most beautiful steam engine noises of the unwound Reichsbahn can be heard.
Or we accompany a life-hungry waitress (Cordelia Weg) through her complex love life, which she has perfectly balanced with three very different men.
All of a sudden Offenbach can be heard
Love, death and the long life in between: the Leipzig writer Clemens Meyer combines these different biographical snippets into a large panorama. Director and co-author Thomas Stuber, also born in Leipzig, artfully merges the story of the characters. It is amazing how quickly it switches from the unadorned backdrop to the horror or the magic of the everyday life of its protagonists. When the cheerful waitress talks about the intoxication of the opera, suddenly a warm glow falls into the office and an operetta by Jacques Offenbach is played.
Meyer and Stuber work with everything they can find: old backdrops, old songs, old heroes. But your "police call" couldn't be fresher. Before that, the two of them had already filmed a "crime scene" together for Hessischer Rundfunk, for which they recreated an old John Wayne Western.
Her new crime thriller is also full of historical allusions.
Once the legendary "police call" investigator Thomas Grawe appears, played by Andreas Schmidt-Schaller from 1986 to 1995.
Because of his relatively unconventional appearance, he was also called "Schimanksi of the East".
When Schmidt-Schaller in the Grawe role is now confronted with pomposity who want to play themselves in the foreground in the questioning of witnesses, he complains in the jargon of the jargon: “It didn't exist in the past.
Didn't start until 1990 because the crazy guys all wanted to be on TV. "
Great longing instead of brown bread
30 years after reunification and 50 years after the first episode, the creators of this anniversary "police call" find an astonishingly light tone. They wash up the emotional debris of the story without killing their characters. How full life is drawn in this thriller! This is also noteworthy because Halle is noted in the "police call" topography primarily by the inspectors Schmücke and Schneider, who between 1996 and 2013 represented the gray bread duo among the television investigators.
In the new Halle area there are now several references to the baroque, semi-criminal, red-light-blissful past life of Inspector Koitzsch.
In one scene, on a desolate blind date, he tries to get a teacher across with a well-worn Heine quote.
Pathetic.
The next morning, the two people in their late fifties are still lying naked in the crumpled sheets between wine bottles and cigarette butts.
The boomers step on the gas again, so you can of course also celebrate the golden anniversary.
Rating:
8 out of 10 points
"Police call: On the Saale hellem Strande,"
Sunday 8:15 pm, Das Erste