Dhe perhaps most unfortunate of all “Tatort” inspectors is called Klaus. He looks very cautious, a tank top model, actually a mama’s boy, a grown man. He would prefer it if there were no evil in the world.
However, because he knows only too well that this evil exists, he should at least stay away from his strangely slim and at the same time a bit chubby body. The rest of the world probably too.
And because all the screenwriters of the “Tatort” in Kiel know that, they make a lot of fun of chasing Klaus Borowski out of his comfort zone. To push him to the extreme. Exposing him to cases and killers that push him to the edge of his moral composure. Until everything breaks out that he is trying to hide under his slipover.
Now we’ve already started with hunting metaphors. And we can calmly turn to Borowski’s new case. It’s called Borowski and the Shadow of the Moon. It’s about hunters, about being hunted, Brahms and Jimi Hendrix and the dark German forest and the great bourgeois longing for redemption from all guilt on both sides of the interrogation table.
A little much? No fear. That’s going pretty well. Borowski and the Shadow of the Moon is one of the most intense Klaus chases. One of the reasons for this is that Borowski not only has to deal with one of the most interesting (and perhaps most similar) opponents. But above all with himself. He encounters his 14-year-old self.
That’s why we have to switch back to September 1970. That’s when Borowski’s 38th case started. It was rainy, stormy. Half of northern Germany, or so it was planned, was on the way to Fehmarn, to the Love & Peace Festival, the Woodstock of the North. Where Ginger Baker was supposed to perform and Canned Heat, Ten Years After, Procol Harum, Rod Stewart and Jimi Hendrix.
When Jimi Hendrix didn’t feel like it at all
The festival was a disaster. The weather stayed bad. Hiring the Hells Angels as security didn’t turn out to be a very good idea. Half of the announced bands never arrived on Fehmarn. And Hendrix, two weeks before his death, didn’t really feel like it.
But you see him in the “crime scene”. Today’s documentary shots and post-patinated ones intersect. Because Klaus Borowski, according to the screenplay by Patrick Brunken and Torsten Wenzel, was also on the way. 14 years old. With Susan. She really wanted to hitchhike.
At a gas station, now one of the primeval locations of new German film romance, they lose track. She wants to continue. Klaus wants to go back to his comfort zone. She gets into a beige VW Bulli, at least that’s how it seems to him. He never sees her again. Ever since then, he’s been angry at himself because he didn’t fight, for her, against himself.
Just a walker? Michael Mertins (Stefan Kurt) at the site where the body was found with Borowski (Axel Milberg, r.)
Source: NDR/Christine Schroeder
Then twenty years later he faces the reconstruction of a face. A tree had fallen in the storm. In the roots the skeleton of a young woman, killed with a boar. The face in the computer looks like Susanne.
The living and the dead meet again and again in the film, the living and those who they once were. The memories that are deceptive, the perspectives that are wrong.
There’s a man in the forest. He has a dachshund with him. Also such a snuggled sweater being. Because Stefan Kurt plays him, you know right away that he’s not just any walker.
Michael Mertins is the dark side of Borowski. A soul from a German. Lives in his father’s property. One of those houses from the 1970s that are now the epitome of architectural evil – at least in television crime dramas.
He sings the solo in the choir. “There is a fountain filled with blood.” Tears come to him. It’s about deliverance from sin in Cowper’s song. At home he crouches in the basement where they once put his father. He sits there between pewter plates, boar catchers, and deer antlers. And listen to Brahms.
The “German Requiem”. The whole house is filled with sound. “For we have no lasting place here,” sings the choir. A sentence that leads to questions. “O death, where is thy sting. Hell, where’s your victory.”
Mertin’s wife sings along upstairs in the kitchen. Borowski and the Shadow of the Moon is also the story of a big, bad marriage. Lena Stolze is Mertin’s wife. You won’t quickly get them out of your head (like you never get out of your head Lena Stolze and Stefan Kurt and Axel Milberg).
Young Klaus Borowski (August Milberg) makes the wrong decision
Source: NDR/Christine Schroeder
August Milberg is the young Borowski. He is as great as the young Ben Becker alongside Otto Sander in “Tod im Häcksler”, the Palatinate “Tatort” from 1991. He would have won every game. Just not this one. Because Borowski, the grown-up, post-traumatized, because Axel Milberg bursts out of himself and all his Borowskiness.
The forest drives you crazy in this very German “crime scene”. And the darkness of souls. And Hendrix, Brahms. And the inevitability of guilt. Borowski and the Shadow of the Moon is quite a great movie.