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Actors Hartmann and Schudt: Take off your mask!
Photo: Thomas Kost / WDR
One man's lunchtime is the other's overtime.
A patrol officer was murdered while jogging. Before his death, he had intimate meetings with changing partners in a specially rented apartment, which he filmed with a hidden camera.
Now the men and women from the homicide squad have to work their way through the recorded chatter and groan of their sexually ambitious colleague over several cups of coffee.
The other's goings-on is listed meticulously: the policeman had 28 different women in front of the camera, 17 of them were married, most of whom came from the colleagues' circle.
Everyone at the homicide department is soon quite tired from watching sex movies, only Faber (Jörg Hartmann) rubs his eyes in delight when he recognizes an old friend on the screen: “She looks like ... Yes, that's Klaus’s wife !
Klaus Wildner from the Fraud Department. «Later, Faber sits down with Klaus in the canteen and happily pokes at his messed up married life, while the other person stirs the goulash in a disgruntled manner.
As a farewell Klaus growls: "Hold him up!" What funny things guys say when they actually want to cry.
This "crime scene" (book: Arnd Mayer and Claudia Matschulla, director: Ayşe Polat) is supposed to be a crime thriller from the middle of the police milieu, including its social customs and sexual opportunities.
But it should be a lot more - and here it becomes problematic because its tone of voice loses its accuracy and the dramaturgy of its objectives.
"I'm a man!"
The murdered policeman with his bang-bang was part of the local pick-up scene, whose members pride themselves on having as many sexual contacts as possible.
So Faber goes undercover to the seminar of one of these tear-openers, who then secretes shoot jam punches like this: "Grab her by the pussy and don't let her go!" Or: "The lion eats when he's hungry.
I'm a man!"
Perhaps the staging of the fat-trousers-talk seems so worn out because you've already heard it in the misogyny "crime scene" from Kiel, where Borowski was also undercover among troubled men. In any case, this "I screw, so I am" pose does not fit at all with the third level that is opened up in the Dortmund case: It is about an incredibly tricky mother-daughter constellation. Both the old and the young work in the police force, but are trapped in a nebulous mix of hatred and attraction that cannot be broken down at this point without revealing the resolution. "Masks" is the somewhat intrusive title of this "Tatort" episode.
From the tough milieu study to the caustic testosterone-stenz satire to the enigmatic women's drama - these are simply a few genre hooks too many, so curiosity will eventually fall by the wayside.
Even the mask analogy - everyone hides in order to hide their true feelings - in the bold version only seems tiring in the end.
Which is a bit of a shame, because the crazy Faber falls in love here for the first time and just drops the mask of the cynic in order to very, very gently vie for a few pats.
In the end, he is so exploited and used like the colleague from the fraud department and the many women who were filmed in bed without their knowledge.
The Faber didn't deserve it either.
Rating:
3 out of 10 points
“Tatort: Masken”,
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., Das Erste
