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Grosz (Franziska Weisz, left) undercover with activists (Gina Haller, middle, and Jana Julia Roth): Tell me what music you listen to and I'll tell you where you stand.
Photo: NDR/O-Young Kwon
Slime and Labskaus are on the menu in the Volx kitchen.
Ex-punk Falke (Wotan Wilke Möhring) asks his old buddies at the counter of an autonomous center because there has been an arson attack from the left-wing scene.
The Hamburg specialty is served in a vegan version, accompanied by »Legal-Illegal-scheissegal«, the anti-authoritarian pogo anthem by Hamburg punk pioneer Slime from 1982.
In the left residential project »Attack«, bikini kills and kicks in the balls are on the agenda.
Inspector Grosz (Franziska Weisz) has crept under a false identity into the flat where people from the FINTA scene with leather crotch protectors are practicing how to incapacitate male aggressors.
FINTA stands for »Women, Inter, Nonbinary, Trans and Agender People«.
The speakers blare Suck My Left One, the anti-patriarchal pogo anthem by riot-grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill from 1992, as the fight drills.
Tell me which bands you listen to and I'll tell you where you stand: the use of music as a code of attitude works perfectly in this »crime scene«.
Punk is presented in all its conflicting, unforgiving facets, which stand for the conflicting, unforgiving facets of leftism.
FINTAs against punk machos
Even if the songs played are a bit out of date, they get to the point of the struggles for demarcation in the scene: he no longer wants to be insulted as a sexist by FINTA people, groans the left-wing activist in the popular kitchen.
And the militant feminist Rollkommando from »Attack« has long since done away with the alt-punks, who are perceived as machos.
Left, radical left, don't give a damn: a scene is falling apart.
This is a "crime scene" of abrupt, hard boundaries.
Right in the middle: an undercover police officer who has perhaps overcome the hardest of all boundaries – namely that of the Pinneberg bourgeois home with the HSV flag in the front yard to the FINTA scene in St. Pauli, which she is supposed to spy on undercover.
But apparently the investigator has fallen in love with a militant activist.
Now she has disappeared from the scene.
The last traces of her can be found in an arson attack on a police officer's home, as a result of which the wife of the attacked man died.
Has the state protector really become so radicalized that she commits deadly attacks?
The expansive subculture tableau was staged by director Mia Spengler, who had previously shot a Hamburg »crime scene« about an aging pimp who can no longer cope with the new boundaries in the neighborhood.
It was a thoroughly soulful Luden melodrama.
Spengler and the author Lena Fakler are now also looking for emotional cement in the confusing terrain between feminist activists and alt-punks, between left-wing leather jacket inspectors and petit-bourgeois suburban police officers.
This is how a story has to be held together, which repeatedly threatens to break apart at some points in the explanation.
The deployment disaster at the G20 summit in 2017, accusations of racism against the police - all of this is also negotiated in »Schattenwelt«.
A lot of talking points come together, not all of them are dealt with appropriately.
And the fast run through the typology of being left threatens to overheat the crime plot.
But in flashbacks and dialogues, the filmmakers then coherently tell of the undercover investigator's radicalization;
of a dissolution of boundaries between the St. Pauli riot and HSV philistinism on the outskirts.
A police thriller in pogo mode.
Rating:
7 out of 10 points
»Crime scene: shadow life«,
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first
