Can this work well? As an inspector, as a street cop – as the role of an investigator in the Cologne “crime scene” in the case of Max Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) has always been interpreted – find fulfillment in a romantic relationship? Cooking together, cleaning up each other’s shoes? Become vulnerable, susceptible to blackmail, distracted by, horribile dictu, feelings while hunting criminals? And can that work well: combine a crime story with a love drama about fears of commitment and hopes, which largely takes place inside the characters? The answer is: Et kütt drop an.
In any case, twenty-four years ago the choice ended tragically. In the episode “Direkt ins Herz” Ballauf succumbed – forgivably – to the blinking of Anja Kling’s eyes, who played a widow who wasn’t particularly grieving (“Is this going to be an interrogation?”), but who did know a lot about the machinations that led to her being shot husbands had led. In the end, there was nothing but pain for Ballauf.
It wasn’t all that psychologically sophisticated back then; The complicated crime plot, on the other hand, seemed hair-raisingly constructed. This time it’s different, the current episode promises in the title, and in fact it’s immediately noticeable that the script was written by Wolfgang S Tauch, who is known not least for unusually sensitive “Tatort” episodes (“Four Years”, “The Night of the Inspectors”) as well as the strong, sometimes theater-intensive production by Thorsten C. Fischer take the subject of love seriously.
Incredible twists
The book also has its own joke. Freddy Schenk (Dietmar Bär), married since the Pleistocene, even if you never see his wife, is annoyed by the clouds of his colleague with a crush. His beloved is the editor of the city magazine “Cologne Alive”; That’s funny in a series that is always about the opposite. Schenk isn’t keen on getting to know Nicola (Jenny Schily). “If I had gone out to dinner with every new friend of yours, I would have been overweight long ago.” A worse author would have killed the comedy with a remark from Ballauf about Schenk’s full-figured physiognomy. “This time it’s different,” the lover simply repeats here.
The crime plot develops in parallel. It’s about a man who drove over under the Mülheim Bridge. He doesn’t seem to have earned his money legally. However, even by “crime scene” standards, this is told rather clumsily. The victim kept bundles of money behind a mirror, always in packets worth 33,000 euros. Then Ballauf remembers: “We recently had a blackmail in Cologne with a demand for 33,000 euros.”
Bang, that’s the solution. And what’s more: Schenk promptly recognizes a Cologne pop singer in a photo that the blackmailer deleted shortly before his death (i.e. in idiot style). The picture shows her at a young age as a supervisor at a youth camp. She now runs a center for traumatized young people. As confidently as Leslie Malton plays the aged singer with a shady past, it still seems as if the film is just fulfilling a tiresome crime thriller duty with this entire plot line, which has even more unbelievable twists, in order to quickly get back to the actual topic.
Fischer likes to let Ballauf, who is emotionally unhinged and no longer understands himself, speak in inner monologues: “Young. Is it good to be so young? Or is it bad?” He reveals his fears and desires off camera, especially when they don’t match Nicolas’ expectations: “Do you notice that I’m lying?”
Despair, anger and guilt
She also answers off-camera. What surprises Max is his girlfriend’s great interest in his current case. “You share what you experienced during the day,” she explains. A street-hardened bull doesn’t believe her, even in a hormonal state of emergency. Does Nicola, who is well connected as a journalist, have any knowledge of the background to the crime? Schenk, on the other hand, does not confide his suspicions to Ballauf, preferring to investigate alone.
S Tauch and Fischer pay great attention to how the growing mistrust undermines Max and Nicola’s young relationship, and how Max suffers from finding out more and more things that his girlfriend has kept secret from him. It is filmed elegantly and interestingly, often with a shallow depth of field, so that the illuminated faces stand out very symbolically from the blurry, dark background. Up to this point, the plot is similar to that of “Straight to the Heart” and many other episodes.
But then things come to a dramatic head – and the film finds its true greatness. The weakly motivated events of the first half no longer play a role, because now it’s about a completely different case, even more like a chamber drama, but above all about getting through despair, anger and feelings of guilt. A complex structure of loyalties and projections becomes visible. Klaus J. Behrendt can show what a psychologically nuanced actor he is, all too often underwhelmed in the sausage stall “crime scene”.
But the three other main actors also keep up in this regard. The film’s long, multi-stage finale, which culminates in a dialogic denouement – well interwoven with flashbacks to what happened – impresses with its emotional intensity and narrative consistency. Without any absurd surprises or last-second action interludes, this finale knows how to maintain its tension. At least on an aesthetic level, it is true that this time it is different.
The crime scene: “This time it’s different” runs on Sunday at 8:15 p.m. on Erste.