Enlarge image
"Funeral for a Dog" actors Mücke, Tomnikov, Sträßner: Precisely constructed crime and love story
Photo: Saddan Sánchez / Sky Deutschland AG and Sky Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG spatially and temporally unrestricted exclusive rights of use.
Three interlocking rings - that is the motif that a young woman and her two lovers in this series have their forearm tattooed by a Bolivian tattoo artist.
It is the symbol of an amour fou for three.
The Finnish girl Tuuli (Alina Tomnikov) and the two boys Felix (Daniel Sträßner) and Mark (Friedrich Mücke) meet in 1998 while working for a South American aid project.
Together they pass dangerous trials, in the course of which a dog has to have a leg amputated.
They jet across dusty slopes in a flatbed truck.
Above all, however, they enter into a complicated bond of love.
"Funeral for a Dog" is the name of the series produced by Sky Germany, which started last Thursday.
In the first episodes, the jealous looks of the expelled guy when Tuuli is about to kiss one of her two partners represent a recurring motif of tension. Because the viewers know practically from the start that Felix will mysteriously disappear years later.
In the present narrative of the eight-part series, set more than a decade after the events in Bolivia, Felix is said to have drowned in a lake in northern Italy.
Mark, his former buddy and rival who has since gained fame as a writer, lives on the banks of the river in a beautifully run-down villa.
The author is visited by Tuuli, her little son, and a journalist from Munich, played by Albrecht Schuch.
The journalist asks many questions about the missing Felix.
Does that sound a bit dodgy?
In fact, the series is an artfully precisely constructed crime and love story.
It is based on a great adventure novel of the kind that German writers rarely succeed in doing.
Thomas Pletzinger, born in 1975, published the book "Burial of a Dog" 14 years ago, received a lot of praise for it and has now also helped to write the screenplay for the series.
The Austrian director Barbara Albert and the German director David Dietl, who work here as a duo, always seem to want to go one better than the erratic narrative style of the book: "Funeral for a Dog" is a puzzle and hide-and-seek game.
It leaves viewers in the dark as to what broke up the Jules and Jim-esque bond between three young lovers.
Chase halfway around the world like in a James Bond movie
The series also shows a hunt halfway around the world, almost like in a James Bond film.
The trip will take you to the Arctic Circle and New York, among other places.
It is about the laws of writing and having children.
And it is backed by many nervous, often siren-like, alluring, sometimes simply superfluous songs.
In moments that aren't so successful, you can feel the director duo's ambition to keep up with the confusion game standards and amazing tricks of the international series business.
And yet the uncovering work that the journalist played by Schuch with the beautiful role name Daniel Mandelkern is driving forward develops a very idiosyncratic pull.
Incidentally, Mandelkern is also hunted by flashbacks.
They are about the failed love for his wife (Anne Ratte-Polle), who is a powerful media woman in Munich.
On the northern Italian lake, it seems that the beautiful Tuuli, of all people, who once founded an apparently tragic love bond with Felix and Mark, seems to want to comfort the battered almond core.
"I can't shake this feeling that it's my fault," Tuuli once said.
She accuses her former companion Mark of having "installed himself in a museum of the past".
In fact, the drama of guilt, love and betrayal that is negotiated in »Funeral for a Dog« proves that it can be a salvation for the viewer when a past that has been suppressed with great effort finally comes to light.
"Funeral for a Dog": since March 17 on Sky Atlantic, on Sky Ticket (in Austria Sky X) and on Sky Q on demand.