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The investigators (Dietmar Bär, left, and Klaus J. Behrendt, right) with pimp (Robert Stadlober): jogging suit folklore
Photo: Martin Valentin Menke / WDR
The rabid and the delicate, the Cologne commissioners try every pitch this time.
A 19-year-old prostitute was raped, strangled and thrown into a sewer.
During the investigation that follows, Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) and Schenk (Dietmar Bär) tackle clients and suspects hard - but when they interrogate another young prostitute, it becomes almost poetic for a moment.
“Your first time was in a performance box?
Well, congratulations!« One of the Cologne inspectors maliciously snaps at a young suitor who picked up the later murdered prostitute on the side of the road in Dad's car in order to have her deflower him in a device set up by the city administration.
When a colleague and friend of the victim is questioned at the police station, the police officer, who is now very empathetic, immediately notices the butterfly tattoo of the interviewee, who then says about the job: "It shouldn't be forever.
At some point we wanted to fly away.«
Before flying away, however, the two friends shot each other with the heroin they had bought with the little money that the pimp dressed in hip-hop gear gave them from their earnings.
Another somewhat forced pitch in this »crime scene«: the Cologne street scene is staged almost like a carnival.
Sweatpants and junkie folklore, straight to the point.
Discarded after sex job
That wouldn't be so bad if the film team (book: Jan Martin Scharf and Arne Nolting, director: Tini Tüllmann) had gotten involved in a deliberately exaggerated milieu thriller - and the Austrian quality workers Josef Hader and Robert Stadlober, who played important supporting roles here, could one can well imagine oneself in a Viennese Strizzi »crime scene« such as the tasty episode »Her mit der Marie!«.
But unfortunately those responsible for the Cologne crime thriller keep losing focus on the genre and the associated tonality: milieu play, prostitution drama or poetic coming-of-age story of two vulnerable teenage souls?
Where the screenwriters and the director want to go becomes less and less clear the longer their »crime scene« lasts.
This also has to do with the fact that the parallel plot from the private life of the relatively new co-investigator, forensic technician Natalie Förster, takes up more and more space as the episode progresses.
It's welcome that the Cologne men's shared flat around Ballauf, Schenk and Jütte is finally getting a strong female part again.
And Förster actress Tinka Fürst also fills it in with an unexcited presence: when examining the suspected perpetrator's DNA found on the victim, the trace analyst Förster is led back into her own difficult family history.
An interesting twist - but soon pushes it away completely from the red-light thriller.
The female protagonists, who appear central at the beginning and who went to work on the prosecution in order to eventually flee their dreary reality, are completely lost.
As soon as they are out of the dramaturgical performance box, they are parked on the side of the road and forgotten.
Rating:
4 out of 10 points
"Crime scene: trace of blood",
Sunday, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste