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"Tatort" with Ulrich Tukur: "Murot and the law of karma"

2022-09-23T15:40:05.829Z


A ventriloquist who deals in guns. A detective who is caught up by the past: The "crime scene" with Ulrich Tukur is a Buddhist crime-and-punishment movie. Highlights!


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Ulrich Tukur as Commissioner Murot: Bad Karma?

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Bettina Müller / HR

"Have you never asked yourself whether your life is being guided?" The Indian alternative medicine doctor, who is treating the inspector for the injuries he sustained during the current investigation, comes up quite unexpectedly with the karma thing about her Corner.

At first that sounds like spiritual quark - so it's nothing for the LKA man, whose dialectic thinking, as we know since his last case, was sharpened by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School.

On the one hand.

On the other hand: When Ulrich Tukur as Commissioner Felix Murot meets his own film character in one episode, gets caught in a time warp in another and celebrates a wine spree with his doppelganger in another, then the idea appears that every action has consequences for life or afterlife , but downright plausible.

Karma and knockout drops

So what did Murot do in his past that brought him into such a situation?

After a few glasses of red wine at a hotel bar, a young woman poured knockout drops into his drink, dragged him to his room and robbed him.

How do you explain something like that to your colleague (Barbara Philipp)?

Hardly with bad karma.

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That same night, an IT expert who apparently had information about illegal global financial transfers and wanted to sell it was murdered in the same hotel.

The man had been robbed by the same young woman who relieved Murot before he was strangled in an extremely clumsy manner.

The lady sometimes wears blonde, sometimes red wigs (strong: Anna Unterberger) and has apparently specialized in robbing older men of their wallets and electronic devices.

After her robbery in the hotel, she has the LKA and unscrupulous financial criminals on her heels at the same time.

That sounds like a chase thriller overwrought into the grotesque;

but despite all the absurd entanglements, the filmmakers set a strangely subdued, slightly lost tone right from the start.

It starts with the opening credits, where we see grainy Super 8 images of a young woman that must have been taken while on vacation in Greece in the 1970s or 1980s.

Decor and dialogues, all understated

Again and again Greek-sounding guitars echo into the plot.

And the con artist with her friend listens to the insanely lulling, insanely smart lounge funk dub rock of the Texas ensemble Khruangbin after hauls of fish.

Soundtrack and score, decor and dialogue, everything here is subtle and delicate despite some cruel punch lines.

Sometimes you think you can hear the refrain of an old Culture Club song from the gently nested levels of action and consciousness: »Karma, Karma, Karma, Karma, Karma Chameleon«.

Tukur's inspector Murot is the big chameleon of the "crime scene";

a character who is deconstructed anew with each episode so that he can then be reinvented against a genre background all of his own.

Western, violent opera, holiday flirtation, everything is possible.

And now even a kind of cheerful Buddhist crime-and-punishment movie.

The focus: an elderly gentleman who has to realize that he is knee-deep in his karma account.

Screenwriter Lars Hubrich had previously written the Frankfurt "Tatort" episode "Falscher Hase" for Hessischer Rundfunk, where the grotesque entanglements in radical eighties aesthetics turned into a heartbreaking love story.

In the new »Tatort« too, Hubrich and director and co-author Matthias X. Oberg never lose sight of the emotional center - even though it's teeming with distractions from bizarre characters and twists.

It's about a ventriloquist who deals guns.

About a worn-out Schlager musician, who philosophizes about the ripping life in the 80s on the Aegean with the Greeks.

And the murder at the beginning happens more by accident, because the attacker hears a symphony at the same time that upsets him so much that he strangles his victim.

But in the end, these weird scenic treasures come together to form a story that breathes the possibility of an apparently genuine emotional life into the projection surface of Murot.

Heartwarming: In the last shot, Murot, caught up with and tormented by the past, smiles like he has never been seen smiling before.

Rating:

9 out of 10 points

»Crime scene: Murot and the law of karma«,

Sunday, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste

Source: spiegel

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