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"Tatort" scene with actresses Nicole Marischka and Jana McKinnon: Who owns a story?
Which voice needs to be heard?
Photo: Bettina Müller / HR
This is how it could sound, the blatant sound of the anger of the abandoned that the German literary scene yearns for.
This is what it could sound like, the authentic voice of the young precariat, of which the editors in Berlin, Cologne or Frankfurt dream: »Fridge empty, cupboard empty, normal, haha.« Or also: »I do my thing, you do yours Thing, die. "
The words come from Luise Nathan (Jana McKinnon), who writes in the competently timed aggro mode about the unreasonable demands of a life in the prefab hell. Mother drunk, sister neglected, stove cold, whack-boom-off, that sort of thing. With sentences like "It pisses off my face", the 19-year-old became a shooting star in the German literary scene, in which a marketable biographical background often counts more than literary strength.
At the beginning of this »crime scene« you can see Luise on a podium reading from her debut novel »Luna eats or dies«, in which the first-person narrator Luna also thinks about jumping from the prefabricated building roof to put an end to her miserable existence.
The next morning, her body is found on the concrete pillars of a bridge.
Inspector Janneke (Margarita Broich) stands in the leaves with her colleague Brix (Wolfram Koch), looks at the dead body and puzzles: "Did she announce her own departure?"
A question that suggests a very limited understanding of literature: what is written has happened.
What is thought has to be implemented.
The matter is a bit more complicated;
in literature as in life.
Just shut up?
So the murder victim did not come from the prefabricated building hell, but from a liberal old building paradise, where she lived with her single mother. Both the daughter and the mother, a respected local politician, campaigned for a social neighborhood café called »#Kelle«, in which people from different backgrounds should be brought together. During the investigation, the investigator duo meets Nellie Kunze (Lena Urzendowsky) in this café, who lives in the social housing estate around the corner and has certain similarities with Luise's Roman Luna. Did the writer exploit the lives of others for her book?
This »crime scene« once again raises the much discussed questions of the current cultural discourse on identity politics: Who does a story belong to? Who can write them down? Which voice needs to be heard? And who just has to shut up?
That could easily have become a sluggish treatise on cultural appropriation and classical isolation;
about an educated middle class daughter who imitates the alleged slang of the gutter, and her friend from the lower class, who is denied media representation.
But with their ambiguous, light-handed staged and coolly photographed crime drama, the young filmmakers Katharina Bischof (direction and book) and Johanna Thalmann (book) leave the identity-political position paper far behind;
also because "real" and "fictional" characters blur into one another in the narrative and complement one another.
Rifle out to the dance
Nellie, Luise, Luna - in an artful network of flashbacks, visualized book passages and forensic reconstructions, the three roles enter into a symbiotic relationship. Here each figure is more than its origin, more than a product of its respective reality. They write their own story.
The Hessian radio has always been the ARD-Anstalt, in which the limits of television crime are expanded and new worlds are created. The »Tatort« episode »Born in Pain« will never be forgotten, where Ulrich Tukur took care of order with the submachine gun in the midst of quotations from Tarantino and Truffaut. Also unforgettable is the episode “Wrong Hare”, in which Broich and Koch moved in a world made entirely of eighties music furniture and fashion. "Luna eats or dies" now also plays in large parts in a parallel cosmos made up of quotes and memories, longings and inventions by Nellie and Luise.
Some scenes seem unreally beautiful, for example this one: In the laundry room of their apartment building, Nelli dances with her mother and little sister to the militant, cheerful ragga pop song "Paper Planes" by the Tamil rapper MIA, in which the chorus is introduced with a cheerful, rhythmic pistol .
A perfect choreography in which the three dancers from the prefabricated housing estate reproduce the shots and the clicks of reloading in harmony.
Gun out to the dance, we shoot you off with our cheerfulness: This is a nice revenge on reality.
Rating:
9 out of 10 points
"Scene of the crime: Luna eats or dies",
Sunday, 8:15 pm, Das Erste