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Marina Eeden (Jara Bihler) performing with a large orchestra: the dream of a great career
Photo: Hendrik Heiden / Hendrik Heiden / BR
Ritalin tablets are consumed like smarties, and in the toilets, bags of benzodiazepines change hands.
Come up, come down, that sets the rhythm of this »crime scene«, which is located in the milieu of young performers from the music and sports sectors.
Budding star violinists try to increase concentration with the pill mix, budding gymnasts manipulate their bodies with chemical support in a way that suits the timing of the competitions.
The commissioners - you know that from other competitive athlete crime novels - can only shake their heads routinely in view of the self-optimization mania.
But this Munich »crime scene« adds a spectacular new component to the somewhat worn-out genre of the sports crime thriller: The ambitious young people go to sleep laboratories to work on their skills in self-directed dreams.
In this way, the musicians want to explore new areas of their virtuosity and the athletes perfect their spatial awareness.
Traces of blood on the roof
The violinist Marina Eeden (Jara Bihler), who is about to embark on a great career, has also worked on her performance in such lucid dreams.
Now she seems to have problems telling dream and reality apart.
She believes that she stabbed her friend with a piece of glass on the roof of the Gasteig cultural center in Munich, but cannot remember the circumstances.
The two young women were friends and competitors;
both vied for the position of deputy concertmaster in the symphony orchestra and had something with the same high-performance gymnast.
When the inspectors Leitmayr (Udo Wachtveitl) and Batic (Miroslav Nemec) investigate the matter, they actually find traces of blood on the roof, but the alleged victim has disappeared.
And another »crime scene« in which the narrative levels are happily pushed under and on top of each other: Anyone who groaned about the literary crime thriller from Frankfurt last Sunday, in which the team of investigators had to crack the case over the exegesis of a novel, will also be on the Munich episode have little joy.
But if you like it tricky and artsy, you will be well served.
Work and sleep become one
Like the one for the HR case, the script comes from Johanna Thalmann, who, together with her co-author Moritz Binder, has gained some amazing facets from the excess of ambition of her young heroines by breaking reality. Director Boris Kunz, who previously co-developed the virtuoso fabulous show-off series »Hindafing«, allows the boundaries between dream and reality to merge. The Münchner Rundfunkorchester plays a specially composed, disturbing score.
There are, of course, the inevitable "crime scene" telekolleg moments; for example, when the investigators are suddenly confronted with their own dreams and have them explained to them by a sleep researcher. And the minor characters stay pretty pale. But it is remarkable how the three filmmakers belonging to a new generation of “Tatort” creators manage to portray the self-exploitation and longing of their young musician: Is Marina living her dream or is she screwing her life?
In doing so, »Dreams« advances to an urgent topic that the art theorist Jonathan Crary already described a few years ago in his book »24/7«: In a thoroughly economized, permanent alarm society in which the boundaries between work, leisure and regeneration have long been dissolved self-sufficient slumber and aimless dreaming are reserved for the losers.
"Zwack sits under the bed and bites the lazy fingers off," the mother of one of the violinists always said to her little daughter when she would rather go to bed than practice.
The Munich »Tatort« with its chord dreamers finds strong figures for the diagnosis of the present: sleep as the last
safe space
before the performance society has been abolished.
Rating:
8 out of 10 points
"Tatort: Dreams",
Sunday, 8:15 pm, Das Erste