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Udo Wachtveitl as Commissioner Leitmayr in »Flash«: What men think they remember when they think about the days they call better times.
Photo: Hendrik Heiden / BR / Tellux FIlm
The nose is the enemy of oblivion.
For some, the smell of a certain perfume triggers memories of a distant love, for others, the scent of a steaming pastry transports you to the kitchen of your long-dead grandmother.
Meanwhile, the old Professor Prince needs a nice strong smell of chlorine to bring the past and thus the memories back to life.
Prinz (Peter Franke) used to work as a psychotherapist, today he suffers from dementia.
In the institute of their slightly younger colleague Vonderheiden (André Jung), they set up Prinz's old practice, and the retro inventory was cleaned with chlorine because Prinz's long-dead wife always used it to clean the furniture.
Suddenly the demented professor is back to his old professional life.
Complicated diagnoses flow perfectly from his lips, he remembers the smallest details that his patients have told him.
Reminiscence therapy is the name of the procedure in which long-term memory is to be stimulated by influencing all the senses.
Smells and noises, colors and music, everything is used to lead the patient back to sunken and forgotten worlds in which he was still sovereign of his own actions.
The inspectors Batic (Miroslav Nemec) and Leitmayr (Udo Wachtveitl) have great hopes in this therapy, because Professor Prinz had once treated a man who had been convicted of a sexual murder and who, as soon as he was released from preventive detention, apparently had one has committed another offense according to the same model.
Now the suspected woman killer has gone into hiding.
Will the investigators get enough clues from the demented professor to catch the culprit?
The Art of Remembering
This memory thriller was shot by Andreas Kleinert.
The director is known for films about forgotten and almost forgotten figures from the GDR, most recently his artist drama »Dear Thomas« about the East German extreme writer Thomas Brasch was shown in the cinema.
It is considered a favorite for next Friday's German Film Awards.
For the Munich "Tatort" team, he once filmed a depressingly beautiful case that led back from the current surf spot on the Eisbach to the almost untouched surfer's paradise of Portuguese Nazaré in the 1980s.
Kleinert is a memory artist;
one who builds great, stirring melodramas from the memories of others.
In the new »crime scene« (book: Sönke Lars Neuwohner and Sven S. Poser), Franz Leitmayr has flashbacks to the past, just like in the surfer episode.
Appropriately, it's about a disco called "Flash" where he - and possibly also the wanted perpetrator - spent wild times in the 1980s.
At some point Leitmayr is in the dusty inventory of the long-closed hard rock disco, and to Led Zeppelin's »Whole Lotta Love« the old world emerges before his eyes: blond ladies with teased manes and in leopard skirts dance and fight for the attention of the guys at the bar - just what men think they remember when they think of the old days, which they call better times.
Director Kleinert stages with a strong rhythm and pays attention to details even in the testosterone fog in the resurrected »Flash«.
However, his thriller has a construction problem: as the story shifts from lost memories to suppressed memories in the course of the ambiguous plot, which are two different things, the whole aspect of dementia, which has been staged so cleverly up to that point, loses its sharpness.
Unfortunately, a close look fades with the happy memory.
Rating:
6 out of 10 points
»Tatort: Flash«,
Sunday, 8:15 p.m., The First
