JEvery culture breeds its own assholes. Unfortunately, that makes the world a bit complicated. An anthropological constant, the percentage of assholes should hardly differ between cultures.
It’s probably about the same with the potential murderers in a culture. That, in turn, doesn’t make it any easier to hunt for murderers in television thrillers. And neither in real life.
Which brings us to Charlotte Lindholm and the “crime scene”. Charlotte has been investigating – for twenty years and thirty cases – in Göttingen. This is a college town. You are open there, you accept refugees with open arms. listen to them Learns.
Feels better because you’ve learned something about the world and the relativity of your little worries. And organizes such fabulous things for refugees as a football game, with which one wants to get into the Guinness Book of Records, because Red-White Leine and FC Liberty kick each other day and night non-stop for a week.
That actually happened before in Hamburg. And in Freiburg there was a case of a young woman who was murdered by a refugee. In his screenplay for Lindholm’s thirtieth case, Daniel Nocke has brought both together to clarify the complexity of our present.
A stone’s throw from the emanation of helpfulness, a young (German) woman is found murdered and raped. It lies on an embankment as if thrown away.
Can Munir (Eidin Jalali) trust Jelena (Mala Emde), the victim’s roommate?
Source: NDR/Christine Schroeder
The woman helped refugees, taught them the language, showed them ways into a foreign culture and through everyday life. Without them, half of the Guinness Record soccer players would not know how they would have survived in their first few months in Germany.
An old, white man claims to have seen the perpetrator flee on a bicycle after what he says was a “not at all European act”. On that, the man says, everything was black. Except for the jersey he was wearing.
Complicated, after all, a television film needs ninety minutes, the story is complicated by the Viking. He sits next to women at a bus stop at the edge of the forest, shows a rather huge knife and gets them to do things that we would rather not know and are not shown in “The Revenge on the World”.
The Viking doesn’t kill anyone
The man is clearly European, an asshole from our culture. He terrified the women of Göttingen. However, he has never used the knife. All of his victims are still alive. But who knows now.
Nocke was supposed to write a socially explosive “crime scene” for the Lindholm anniversary. He did. The contradictions, the paradoxes of the current debate culture run through this case like a mushroom network, down to the finest ramifications of the case.
Clearly, nothing is simple. “Revenge on the World” is a story of dependencies, confusion, and fatally misguided feelings. And the assholes.
Which brings us finally to Charlotte Lindholm. You really learn to hate them if you haven’t done so before. It could have been done long ago in the past two decades. Because of the neglect of her child, for example, which the single parent had written on her back at Maria Furtwängler’s request (we don’t know what happened to him) – they constantly wanted to call the youth welfare office.
It would have been easy for Nocke to send this incarnate German sincerity down the wrong path to its tragic end. To simply let her investigate to a fatal end with her very blonde and meanwhile artistically feminist morality.
It has looked like this for a long time. Charlotte Lindholm, the feminist, breaks out into the bourgeois racist. Insane, she follows a trail supposedly left behind by the fugitive whom Luna, the murdered woman, had particularly taken to her heart. Taken too much to heart.
The man disappeared for a good hour. Among other things, because “The revenge on the world” is dramaturgically precisely calculated. After half an hour it’s over with the Viking. After an hour, Munir, the missing physicist who allegedly fled twice, and whom the German women can’t stop talking to, reports for the first time. After an hour and a half, everything explodes in a bloodbath and ends with a sentence that almost makes you love Charlotte Lindholm again.
“Don’t make me a Nazi”
No one in between has clean motives, no matter how well-meaning they may be. For example, Luna’s roommate (inimitable in her unrested, lightning-fast obstinacy: Mala Emde).
Her name is Elena. Luna’s infatuation with Munir got on her nerves and she still doesn’t want to be cornered by the massive racial profiling Lindholm: “Don’t make me a Nazi,” she says.
Every byway in this convoluted contemporary story, which runs its nose bloody at the previous refugee “crime scene” grid, is extremely well cast and fulfills more than just the status of an investigation decoration.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a detective film or a social play. However you go into this drama with the unreliable main character – “you always take yourself with you” and come out differently.