2023-05-07 12:20:15
“I’m listening,” says the investigator, looking at his smartphone like a device that is only suitable for communication. Like someone who got stuck somewhere in the nineties. Around the time his car, this red, boxy Swedish car that fits him like a tailored suit, came on the market.
“I hear” is one of Klaus Borowski’s quirks that we will miss when – as has now been announced – it will be over in 2025 after almost two dozen years with the era of the colossal oddball commissioner from Kiel, who in turn Axel Milberg in will hardly be able to get rid of later in life because he has entered into an almost shattering symbiosis with him.
How we’re going to miss him at all, the selfish, empathetic kid whose cases are the only ones in Sunday night crime land to be signed with the inspector’s name. And the whole investigative work, open to social analysis as well as the surreal and outlandish, whose leeway and special position Milberg and the responsible NDR editors have developed over decades.
But it’s still too early for obituaries. So back to the case. Back to “I hear”. And to “Borowski and the Great Rage”.
Everything is in there like in a nutshell from the Borowski method. And everything depends on the phone and on listening, as if there were a kind of bucket list on the developer wall in the editorial office of those quirks that Borowski still has to work through until his hopefully peaceful end. And as a result, he has finally arrived at the foot of the pedestal of his complacency.
And on par with Almila Bagriacik’s Mila Sahin, the last of his colleagues who tried to survive in his shadow, put up with him. However, it is not to be expected that the “crime scene” in Kiel will always be called “Sahin and …” after 2025. But that’s Spökenkiekerei now.
Back to anger. A lot of things happen at the same time that don’t happen at the same time. It’s a bright summer’s day (which doesn’t happen that often in Klaus Borowski’s cosmos, which otherwise tends to be grey-sky). A woman – obviously a woman – trudges ruthlessly along the banks of the fjord, hidden in a green hoodie. She is angry and pushes a cyclist to the side. She ends up under a truck, you hear screams, later you see her relatives, but this time it doesn’t matter.
Bloody images, flickering images
Borowski stands in front of a home that was once a dream come true in the late ’60s, but whose gardening efforts were shelved around that time. You can see him through the honey-colored frosted glass on the door. Then he lies in front of a Kiel clinic on the street. Someone half smashed his skull in, so his mind lets him see even stranger images, scraps of memories, than he always does. Bloody images, images of stairs and bathrooms, flickering images.
“Your hippocampus is laughing at you,” the woman who crosses his path in the hospital like an angel will later say to him. And she – Sophie von Kessel alone is worth tuning in on – is right. And then he hears a strange ringtone. Smells weird things. And then his cell phone rings. And then he says he’s wearing an open-backed nightgown and a nice mesh bandage around his head: “I’m listening.” And then he hears Finja and Celina.
They are half sisters. Celina just got her driver’s license and – judging by the flickering videos, which are the only ones we see of her until the end of this “crime scene” – resembles a lot the young Billie Eilish. You are on the run. The fact that they are has to do with Borowski’s horror house, in whose bathroom there is a dead person, and with the cyclist who had an accident.
The dead woman is Celina’s grandmother, the cyclist the victim of Celina’s great anger, the extent and trigger of which is the heart of this story. It’s a narrow world out there, and a brutal one. The mother is still there, who was overwhelmed by Celina, the system cracker, the stepfather who abused her, and the neighbor who dropped Borowski off at the clinic and who also has something sinister in common with Celina. Conveniently, he’s sort of a janitor at the hospital.
The clinic becomes the investigation center. Borowski listens to Celina, tries to gain her trust, to reason with her. Telephone counseling takes place and flirt. Borowski is on the phone in the hospital basement (one of the great mysteries of this case is how he is connected) and in the undergrowth of the hospital’s flower shop.
Borowski (Axel Milberg) and the clinic angel (Sophie von Kessel)
Source: NDR/ARD/Thorsten Jander
Around the tragic, funny, desperate dialogues with Celina, in the course of which the girl becomes part of the above-mentioned gradual unmasking of Borowski’s self-satisfied method without him noticing, Eva and Volker A. Zahn, the screenplay routines, have a fine undergrowth of dramatic and knitted very fine side and side plots.
The angel with the hippocampus, for example, with which there is a heartbreaking and a bit blasphemous scene in the clinic chapel and of which only Borowski in his faded self-absorption does not notice that she does not look even more damaged than Borowski because of an alcohol-related fall on the stairs.
Sahin’s, who does all the honest investigative work that Borowski, the genius on the phone, can’t and doesn’t want to do because he actually despises himself in his own arrogance. Of whom he, who still sometimes treats Sahin in such a patronizing manner that one feels like slapping him, but finally has to admit that she contributed more to the halfway happy ending than his leased line to a teenager who treats him, the old hand, like a special after a beautiful carrot has led astray.
And the bottom line: Borowski is healthy again and a huge step closer to his incarnation through self-knowledge. Borowski’s angular red cart is broken. And we are richer by a beautiful, spun, strange, strangely light evening.
#Tatort #Kiel #Axel #Milberg #Commissioner #Borowski