Rostock "police call" about gender identity: "I'm a car mechanic and I'm a trans man"

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Jonathan Perleth (l.) as Daniel: In the labyrinth of external and self-perception

Photo:

Christine Schroeder / NDR

When you think of a safe space in Berlin-Mitte, you might imagine something different than in Rostock-Evershagen.

In this »police call« from the Baltic Sea, it is a self-help workshop for camper van owners, in which trans men talk about their fears and desires before and after they come out while fixing their car.

Here you will find people with whom you can discuss tuning problems as well as transition questions.

One of these men is young Daniel, who lives at home with his father and sister in the middle-class police family and works as a kindergarten teacher.

In his beloved camper, he keeps rehearsing what it means to finally go out as Daniel, the leather jacket wearer with a David Bowie quiff, and not as the kindergarten teacher Daniela with a bob cut.

The van is his I-machine

David Bowie is wanted

Then a first Tinder date in a disco.

Daniel spends a few nice moments with his female date, eventually they separate again, the spark didn't jump over.

The woman is murdered in front of the club, and Daniel can see the perpetrator drive away from his camper.

The next day he himself, the leather jacket wearer with a David Bowie quiff, is wanted as the suspected perpetrator.

The plot of this "police call" is built consistently.

The psychological conflict is reflected in the crime story: as soon as Daniel has found expression for his true identity, he finds himself in the role of the culprit.

Screenwriter Benjamin Hessler previously co-wrote the risk-taking psychoanalysis thriller series »Freud« on Netflix. In this »police call« he now sends the trans man Daniel into a labyrinth of external and self-perception.

In doing so, Hessler and his director Dustin Loose ("ZERV - Time of Reckoning") dispense with didactics under public law.

They do not lead their character to his or her gender identity in a pedagogically productive way, so that viewers get the key terms to accompany trans people in the family and environment in the finding process.

Instead, they show their hero Daniel A. as a tragically entangled figure with a psychological fall.

The intoxication in the leather jacket

The fact that the »Polizeiruf« episode »Daniel A.« has not become a manual for transition support, but rather a stirring identity thriller, is of course also due to the actor in the title role: Jonathan Perleth was in the transition phase himself during filming.

He embodies his trans man with all the frustration and happiness inherent in the character at that point in time: he plays the painful tying of his breasts in the van, but he also plays: the intoxication in the leather jacket, the desire for new sexual experiences.

The thriller stays very close to the main character and shows: fear, egoism and desires.

All facets of the human are integrated into this psychogram.

The fact that the Rostock "police call" itself is in a phase of transition is hardly noticeable in the condensed staging.

In the penultimate episode, Commissioner Bukow, played by Charlie Hübner, is up and running;

Commissioner Melly Böwe (Lina Beckmann, Hübner's wife in real life) and Commissioner König (Anneke Kim Sarnau) are still warming up: one (Böwe) loves pastries and gets goosebumps when listening to Franz Schubert, the other ( king) does pull-ups and push-ups against the emotional response and angrily throws the pastry through the office.

One of the most beautiful scenes of the superintendent of steel bodies König has during her undercover research in the disco: a massive guy with a mustache smiles at her from the counter and sends her a gin and tonic.

König: "That's really out of date, friend!" The two of them start talking anyway.

König's counterpart, also a guy from the Camper self-help workshop, introduces himself: "I'm a car mechanic and I'm a trans man."

The sequence of self-ascriptions also shows the modernity of this thriller: first comes the self-chosen hobby, then, quite naturally, the unchangeable identity.

Rating:

8 out of 10 points

"Police call 110: Daniel A.",

Sunday, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste