2023-10-29 15:14:10
You can of course send commissioners to the stars on Sunday evenings to test their limits and sharpen their perception. Then they fly around for a few minutes, smiling blissfully – like Felix Murot did last Sunday in search of happiness – while “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” waltzes through space and an ancient bone-shaped cell phone comes sailing in, which establishes a telephone connection to God. You can do it.
Or you send them – as if to calm the Sunday evening crime scene customer soul that is still boiling over Murot’s cosmic-philosophical “crime scene” demarcation – as investigative ethnologists or ethnological investigators in the deepest Bavarian province. Batic and Leitmayr, the white-headed detectives from the Bavarian capital, have to go to Gmeining in “Queens”, their 93rd joint case. Space wouldn’t be much of a stranger to the people of Munich.
The sky is blue and white, the meadows are fundamentally green, cows moo, sheep bleat, beer flows. People are driven through the village with tractors on trailers. The dirndl density is only exceeded by that at Oktoberfest.
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They are – the end of the 378-year-long Wittelsbach Monarchy 105 years ago is an ever-festering wound in the land of Bavaria – all there for Queen’s Day. The Altöttinger Flour Queen, the Gunzenhausen Herb Queen and almost fifty other proud, fully democratically elected local and product representatives (potato, hops, asparagus, onion) do the honors in Gmeining, arrange their crown and apply for it with dizzyingly presented cleavage to be represented in the annual calendar of the “Bavaria-Bund”.
Of course, there is no more Gmeining than Queen’s Day. But both are a pretty great idea. Robert Löhr, who wrote the “Queens” book, uses the dramaturgical comedy stadium costume of his story as a chic packaging for a negotiation about the current state of some social things, where hardly any city dweller looks unless there is an election, Hubert Aiwanger himself wants to bring back democracy. Or a real murder happens.
Luise (Phenix Kühnert) is the first trans woman among the queens. Josef Gehrling (Wolfgang Fierek) wanted to prevent that
Quelle: BR/Odeon Fiction GmbH/Luis Zeno Kuhn
This, in turn, doesn’t happen in “Queen’s Day”. What makes the pathologist in Munich explode. The corpse that Leitmayr and Batic have to go to Gmeining to see is not dead yet. Josef Gehrling is in a coma, the pathologist is becoming more and more nervous and finally wants to cut him open.
Gehrling went into anaphylactic shock and then someone put a bolt gun to his head and pulled the trigger. One of the queens was seen rushing out of his hotel room, losing a shoe in true Cinderella fashion.
You can almost understand the bolt gun thing. The Gehrling was a dog (Wolfgang Fierek plays the dog frighteningly well). Head of the “Bavaria Bund”, a kind of peasant Weinstein, a misogynistic, corrupt fossil of the Bavarian brand of poisonous masculinity, which is probably still very much alive.
Again and again we dive into Gehrling’s head. Director Rudi Gaul regularly inserts flashbacks of scenes of abuse and assault on asparagus and potatoes and onions, as Gehrling condescendingly calls the queens, into the otherwise fairly conventional crime plot.
Leitmayr and Batic, the white men from the capital, which is hated throughout the country, are brought by Löhr to the limits, not of their enlightenment ability, but of their enlightenedness.
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At some point, Batic ends up in a bathrobe in the room of the onion queen who helps the townspeople navigate the maze of customs, sensibilities and dialects because her part-time job is as a police student.
Leitmayr talks a lot to Sylvie (Veronika Ferres). Sylvie organizes the regents’ event, and she knows what the Gehrlings are doing and lets them do it. Because it’s always been that way, because, she says, it always takes two to do what the Gehrling is up to, because once the woke moralists have taken power over the queens, she says, she can close her shop them, because the pumpkin and the potato would then only be able to traipse down the catwalk in a pantsuit.
Of course, modernity has long since arrived in Gmeining and is rubbing up against tradition in the bloodiest and funniest way. The Regents begin to break the power of the Gehrlings. And the first trans woman achieved a crown.
What happened to her, how Gehrling tried to prevent her from getting anywhere near a glittery thing in her hair, using all the anti-trans clichés, is one of the most touching episodes in this station drama. And at the same time shows that the “crime scene” should not puff itself up compared to the common Gmeininger when it comes to enlightenment and gender equality. Phenix Kühnert is – in 2023 – the first trans person to be allowed to star in a Munich “crime scene”.
While Gehrling, observed by the drooling pathologist, fades away into the eternal man’s depths, Löhr, kept at a level of comedy that is almost Ubermünster-esque by quite subtle, rather coarse jokes, highlights the dependencies, depravities and antiquities of such events, emerges into the dreams of the proud and the injured and defensive country women and into the muck of Bavarian country life.
You can save yourself at least three years of “Rosenheim Cops” and two days at the Oktoberfest – here you can learn more about Bavaria.
#Tatort #Munich #trans #woman #queen