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Mark Waschke as Commissioner Karow: "And what if not?"
Photo: Stefan Erhard / rbb
The guy's on it like a pit bull again.
Wriggles grimly through the nocturnal turmoil of Berlin, just waiting to be bumped into and ready to fight, puts his head back on his muscular neck when the time comes.
"Be careful where you step," says the opponent, who is almost a head taller.
"And what if not?" the pit bull snorts.
A classic gaze duel follows – suddenly the taller one kisses the smaller one heartily on the mouth.
A beautiful scene that exemplifies this »crime scene« rich in twists.
The thriller is about machismo in the mafia world - and yet it constantly opens up double doors to different gay stories of longing.
Worse and lonelier than ever
After the death of his colleague Rubin in the last Berlin episode, Commissioner Karow, played by Mark Waschke, is now traveling solo in Berlin.
He looks worse than ever and is investigating a murder case that takes him back to his own past: an undercover agent (Andreas Pietschmann from »1899«) was murdered, it is about a friend of Karow's from his youth.
The corners of the victim's mouth were cut open, the murder weapon was placed precisely on the forehead - an apparently clear case of "milieu execution", as it is still called at the crime scene.
As it turns out, the murder victim had been investigating a criminal clan under a false identity for a long time.
First the man managed to gain the trust of the chief (Sahin Eryilmaz) in a family brothel, then he hired himself out as a driver who escorted the male and female prostitutes out of the brothel.
The policeman kept a painstaking diary about his undercover life, and Karow studies it in the sparse apartment of his colleague and childhood friend like a log of neglect.
Farewell to the bourgeois self
Screenwriter Erol Yesilkaya is one of the great genre virtuosos of the »Tatort« scene;
he regularly builds perfectly formed cop thriller stories, serial killer epics or haunted house stories, but always gives them his own spin.
For the Berlin »Tatort« he sent the investigator Karow on the trail of Robert De Niro and »Taxi Driver«, including the original soundtrack.
In the new Berlin episode, Yesilkaya imitates the form of the classic undercover thriller and uses flashbacks to reconstruct how the lonely investigator wolf split off his bourgeois self in order to be able to merge into the criminal cosmos.
The voice of the dead undercover agent speaks from the off, the scenery is partly artificially exaggerated.
It is hard to imagine that, like in this red-light »crime scene«, in the strip bars of Berlin, only exquisite classic and yacht rock from Cream to Steely Dan could be heard on a jukebox.
But this crime thriller doesn't really want to be an authentic gangster hit à la »4 Blocks« (although it has considerable plot similarities), but rather unfolds more and more as a gay love story.
Director Stefan Schaller previously shot the masterful Rostock »Polizeiruf«, in which a socially excluded single mother kills her tormentors - a brutal revenge movie with a lot of empathy.
Schaller also stages the new »crime scene« with a good sense of ambivalence, emotional chaos and open scores.
However, the retrospective passages into Karow's youth are simply too template-like, the sluggish coming-of-age drama unfortunately takes speed out of this otherwise longingly striving into the abyss crime thriller.
Pitbull is looking for love please pet!
Rating:
7 out of 10 points
»Crime scene: the victim«,
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first