2023-04-30 08:22:06
Et is not nice what happens to people. It’s never like that in crime films. A man is sitting in a chair. We are in a Zurich hotel suite. The man moderated a fundraising gala for children in Africa the night before.
They were seen in heart-rending images in their sun-drenched misery, while Mozart’s clarinet concerto was playing, which could have warned those in the audience who were somewhat cinematically educated about the moral Eurocentric depravity of the event (“Jenseits von Afrika”, a film against which post-colonialists would organize memorial marches today). ).
The man’s head was neatly perforated with a bolt gun (which, you learn in this “crime scene”, isn’t easy because if you get it wrong, the head will… well, yeah). He then had five toes removed with surgical precision.
A little later, a rower on Lake Zurich fared not much better, he was the main sponsor of the gala, a true benefactor in Africa. And a woman – after that you really sleep badly at first – is soon pressed with an oak processionary moth down her throat, which has really unpleasant consequences.
Maybe you can explain what went wrong at this Zurich “crime scene” on a whiteboard. It’s such a magnetic thing, you put paper and pictures on it and then you can draw lines with markers and make connections. “Rope”, as we now naively imagine it, came about like sometimes, when we didn’t have time to go shopping, our evening meal (that’s what they call dinner or supper in Switzerland). Someone left something and we’ll make something out of it.
In the case of “Seilschaft,” someone has whiteboarded “Mafia” and “green-washing” and pinned pages and pages of material about the new colonialism, the continued exploitation of the poor in Africa through microcredit and mafia-style hedge funds pretending to do good, but only think – it’s capitalism, baby – about the profit optimization of their investors. And then there is “Something with child abuse” and “REVENGE”. Karin Heberlein and Claudia Pütz should, well, cook a screenplay out of it.
A story straight out of our fridge
The result is something that, in its strange imbalance, one could almost take for a portrait of the country of his origin, which also gives the impression of having gotten off center. Instead of ignoring the mafia, for example, and concentrating on the revenge story – you don’t have to take everything that’s lying around in the fridge – Heberlein and Pütz try, which is very honorable, to absolutely get everything into one . What goes wrong, what tastes bland, nothing half and nothing whole.
It goes something like this. Because cutting off your toes is a mafia technique (and they probably wanted to provide the prosecutor with a love interest), a mafia expert is flown in who says clever things about the ‘N drangheta, but otherwise immediately disappears behind the whiteboard. Albanians and Italians are at odds with each other in Zurich’s Mafia milieu. And in various explanatory dialogues, the system of African activities of the mafia is unraveled.
Possibly because one had the not entirely wrong feeling not to demonize only the rich and mostly not so beautiful in a Zurich “crime scene” again, “Seilschaft” gradually swings into the private sphere. That is flimsy in Tessa Ott (Carol Schuster). Alongside Isabelle Grandjean (Anna Pieri Zuercher), they form the only all-female detective duo in the “crime scene”.
In Zurich, Ott is responsible for the emotional, for the flaming hatred of the top five thousand that she has because she comes from there herself. Tessa has a suspicion, she distrusts the mafia theory. Something else is going on there. A well-known story – that’s why “Seilschaft” resembles such a bland soup made of rather stale ingredients – she senses abuse of power, perversion and cover-up.
Because she, that’s the quiet horizontal thread that runs through the younger Zurich “Tatort”, knows everything very well as a scion of the basically morally disreputable moneyed nobility from the Gold Coast. And she’s a stubborn, prickly empathy monster, too.
Which leads them astray and “ropes” to a narrative urgency that is the best thing about this “crime scene.” She cannot save him. This whiteboard catastrophe could not be saved with the use of a dozen script defibrillators.
The Swiss “crime scene” has always been the problem child of Sunday evening crime thrillers – simply because of its acoustic artificiality, because it is dubbed every time. Sometimes too snored, not infrequently half-baked, often simply boring, without a line and a reasonably consistent aesthetic direction.
With his transfer from Lucerne to Zurich and the appointment of Grandjean and Ott, one had hoped for the best. It could have been something like Vienna.
#bit #mafia #bit #Zurichs #crime #scene