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Berg (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and Tobler (Eva Löbau, right) interrogate the suspect (Lisa Hagmeister): "Sandra stays Sandra."
Photo: Benoît Linder / SWR
The local inspector looks at the beautiful blocks of homes that have sprout from the ground in Breisgau between cornflowers and the remaining solitaire apple trees.
"Ten years ago it was all still an orchard," he says, and with a sore look makes it clear that he doesn't welcome the development.
With the disappearance of the diverse flora, a kind of social monoculture then took hold: whoever made it here worked for it, and pays attention to a certain uniform, quiet demeanor.
Social ostracism happens faster here than the marquise can be let down in front of strangers.
Gaping neighbor, grim mother-in-law
But the young mother Sandra (Lisa Hagmeister) is not really the marquise type.
She lives out her difference in front of everyone, and everyone gets upset about her without even being able to define her difference.
»Sandra stays Sandra«, this statement keeps coming in different variations when you talk about her with people around you.
It's never meant in a positive way.
And there is a lot of talk about Sandra right now because her husband and younger son are missing.
There is no trace, but the gaping neighbor, the fierce mother-in-law and the colleagues in the mayor's office believe they know that only Sandra can be behind the mischief.
They whisper to the investigative duo Franziska Tobler (Eva Löbau) and Friedemann Berg (Hans-Jochen Wagner), who have arrived from Freiburg, all sorts of conjectures about the married woman and newcomer.
Breisgau brutal.
The screenplay for the provincial crime thriller was written by Bernd Lange, who established the Black Forest as the terrain for the culture war between long-time residents and the urban elite for the Black Forest »crime scene« with the first episode of Tobler und Berg in 2017.
Since then, current conflicts between rural bourgeoisie and urban service providers, between conservatives despairing of the present and cosmopolitans longing for grounding have been played out there again and again.
Social Laboratory Black Forest
How does the other tick?
Despite all the concentrated provinciality, the Black Forest "crime scene" is good as a laboratory for society as a whole, where the big social clashes and conflicts of the republic are played out on a small scale.
»The Views of Others« is the beautiful title of the new episode, and it appears as a strong narrative arrangement that the main character, the mother in eternal outburst mode, is described through the projections and charges of her suspicious and unfavorable environment.
Leading actress Hagmeister maintains such a high energy level even in unspectacular moments that we are automatically drawn into her inscrutable life;
drive her across the empty dance floor at the company party, where she disappears lonely to The Cure, or through her mother-in-law's nursery, where she is insulted.
The problem: despite all efforts to empathize, she remains alien to us, like the Breisgau vegetable farmers and small-town bureaucrats.
First of all, it's great when the main female character isn't psychologically filleted for simple Sunday evening consumption.
It was the same in the last »Tatort« from the Black Forest, where Johanna Wokalek sparked our fantasies as the publisher's daughter and possible patricide.
We didn't really know who the woman was even at the finale of the case.
The situation is similar now with »The Views of Others« (Director: Franziska Schlotterer).
At the end there is an incredibly well constructed and staged revelation passage, a bourgeois power game - in which the female main character suddenly only has a supporting role.
»Sandra stays Sandra.« A projection, a void, a riddle.
We would have liked to have gotten a little closer to her.
Rating:
5 out of 10 points
"Crime scene: the looks of others",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first