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"Tatort" scene with Klaus J. Behrendt, Dietmar Bär, Manfred Zapatka: It's better not to disappoint this man
Photo: Martin Valentin Menke / WDR
Every godfather has his own plea: as Don Corleone in »Godfather«, Marlon Brando gently petted his kitten while expressing to his counterpart that he was disappointed with his lack of loyalty.
Manfred Zapatka now cracks his beloved walnuts in the new »crime scene« as a mafia-loving delicatessen retailer Viktor Raschke, when he discusses with debtors, wards and poor wretches what he expects from them in return for his extravagant goodness.
Of course, cracking has a nice, suggestive side effect: you don't want to get this man to crack something else.
So you do everything you can to not disappoint him.
But Raschke is gram right now.
One of his sons died in an attack on a Persian restaurant.
The body lay dead and burned in front of the counter.
Raschke has now summoned the owner of the restaurant to his camp to hold him accountable.
He had once provided the restaurateur with capital to open his shop, so he asked him to hire his useless, violent, convicted son.
This is how small favors between friends work.
And now this disappointment, this pain, this thirst for revenge!
Alexandra, Adamo and Ebstein included
Isn't there a little, mean, offended godfather in all of us?
It's a nice shoot how the filmmakers let the emotional grammar and the economy of violence of the classic mafia drama in German medium-sized companies come to fruition.
The godfather, patriarch and tormentor here is the German grocer, who keeps his partly migrant environment in check with mini-loans and extortion.
That may be a steep premise from a sociological point of view, but it ends up being a solid and sentimental milieu thriller;
Classic hits by Alexandra, Salvatore Adamo and Katja Ebstein included.
The latter sings "Farewell is a bit like dying," while the delicatessen mobster beats a disgraced neighborhood resident into a coma in an old neighborhood bar
.
Dynamics and imagery of this »crime scene« are remarkable, but sometimes those responsible (book: Paul Salisbury, director: Nina Vukovic) overshoot the mark;
such as when Inspector Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) has to interrogate a suspect on the basketball court while the hostile throws baskets.
Despite the sometimes exaggerated efforts to create particularly dynamic scenes, this »crime scene« develops a good emotional pull. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that Commissioner Schenk (Dietmar Bär) is personally involved in the case, since the threatened Persian restaurateur is his daughter's partner – please don't nag, because the bias aspect is resolved very casually.
And on the other hand, that there is a drama about sexual identity under the gangster mackerel behavior - anyone who saw the Berlin "crime scene" two weeks ago will quickly guess what it's about.
Despite the beating and threatening gestures, this thriller also suggests that the days of old-school patriarchs stroking kittens and cracking nuts could soon be over.
Rating:
7 out of 10 points
"Crime scene: protective measures",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first