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Munich "Tatort": A case à la Agatha Christie and alarming hints from Miroslav Nemec

2022-12-26T17:56:07.997Z


The makers of the Munich “Tatort” have come up with a kind of film within a film for the 90th case. Large parts of the action take place in an English mansion 100 years ago. The investigators Ivo Batic and Franz Leitmayr (Miroslav Nemec and Udo Wachtveitl) end up there on the occasion of a crime dinner at their colleague Kalli Hammermann's (Ferdinand Hofer). It is not only the events at Beckford Hall that are disturbing. Commissioner Batic contemplating retirement...


The makers of the Munich “Tatort” have come up with a kind of film within a film for the 90th case.

Large parts of the action take place in an English mansion 100 years ago.

The investigators Ivo Batic and Franz Leitmayr (Miroslav Nemec and Udo Wachtveitl) end up there on the occasion of a crime dinner at their colleague Kalli Hammermann's (Ferdinand Hofer).

It is not only the events at Beckford Hall that are disturbing.

Commissioner Batic contemplating retirement...

The crime scene is an English mansion, the victim is a butler named Arthur Rogers and the investigators are Lightmyer and Partridge - oh my god, are we in the wrong movie?

Yes!

And no!

Screenwriter Robert Löhr and director Jobst Christian Oetzmann have come up with a wonderful (Christmas) surprise for what is now the 90th Munich crime scene.

A (detective) game whose characters come to life, so to speak, and take the viewer back to Britain 100 years ago.

And so in "Mord unter Misteln" the well-known protagonists Franz Leitmayr (Udo Wachtveitl), Ivo Batic (Miroslav Nemec) and Kalli Hammermann (Ferdinand Hofer) as well as the other guests of a crime dinner are transformed into characters of that time - in the scenes of that time.

And the result is a thriller that would have done Agatha Christie credit.

Plot and character are fine parodies of the art of the doyen (1890-1976). In the course of the investigation, it turns out, unsurprisingly for those familiar with the genre, that everyone from this illustrious company would have had a motive to murder the butler.

That alone is amazingly exciting and authentically illustrated (camera: Volker Tittel, costumes: Sylvia Risa), to which the setting, Oettingen Castle near Nördlingen (Swabia), also contributes.

The highlight of this film, however, is the idea of ​​letting the two chief inspectors step out of the (game) plot and celebrate their rivalry with a lot of self-mockery.

Not only their dialogues are pointed and full of allusions (Batic/Nemec, who played there before: "It looks like Pilcher!" - Leitmayr/Wachtveitl: "I don't know it!"), The others are allowed to shine with weird sentences, above all Sunnyi Melles as Lady Mona Bantam ("My Wedgewood!"), a jaded beast right out of a picture book.

So it was all great fun, but with an – from the fans’ point of view – alarming undertone.

Because Ivo Batic is clearly thinking about retirement.

"I just asked," he says at the very end to reassure everyone.

Don't worry, he won't be retiring any time soon.

Source: merkur

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