2023-05-15 17:08:00
KIndians are actually always a burden in and for the “crime scene”. A punishment, so to speak, without a previous crime. There is a scene that sums up the relationship between the generations in a Sunday evening thriller in an almost iconic way. There you see Commissioner Charlotte Lindholm, who expressly had Maria Furtwängler write a motherhood in the personality portfolio. She carries a refrigerator on her back through an allotment garden.
One is constantly on the verge of contacting the youth welfare office when one sees the neglect that Lindholm and Co. inflict on their descendants. And when you look into the deep chasm that opens up between investigating producers like Thorsten Falke and their offspring.
The inspectors’ children have now grown up and have long outgrown the stories in Hanover and Dortmund and Magdeburg. However, the level of speechlessness between the generations has not diminished over the years. Not in the “crime scene”, not in society.
When a Sunday night thriller is called “The Secret Life of Our Children”, a title that leaves nothing to be desired in terms of sub-subtlety, one is of course immediately electrified. Less because of the children and the secret, but because of the perspective, of “us”. And rightly so.
The new case for the two Freiburg inspectors Frieder (Berg) and Franz (Tobler) can never be freed from the parents’ arrogant view of the foreign world of their children and young people, which runs through the recent history of “Tatort” anyway . Using a tiny, ethnological flashlight, the film looks at the world of those young people who were born sometime between 1995 and 2010, Generation Z, in an artificially appropriate way.
Determine Berg (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and Tobler (Eva Löbau).
What: SWR/Benoit Linder
One of them is found dead in the Rhine. His name is Christopher Gnabri. He is washed ashore at a weir. Benno and Zoe were his best friends. Benno and Zoe have parents who live together but are only half their parents. A beautiful, harmonious patchwork.
At least that’s what Mirjam (Benno’s mother) and Paul (Zoe’s father) want to create. She builds violins, he teaches piano. But all this is not harmonious. We are in Fribourg. In – according to the still common fantasy – left-green filthy new-bourgeois paradise, where wolf (parents) and lamb (children) live together peacefully, full of trust and full of knowledge of each other.
The fact that this knowledge is not very far away, that this ignorance, cluelessness is the cause of all evil in Frieder and Franz’s tenth case, is already indicated by the title with the steam ram. So that the gap between the generations is not overlooked, the screen is often divided – with scenes of the young and scenes of the old on both sides of a cinematic demarcation line.
“What do we know about our children,” asks Miriam, so that you don’t lose sight of it, somewhere in the middle of the story. And: “What do we know about ourselves?” Nothing – at that point in time you already know more than you would like – would be the right answer. And the ignorance, which everyone who has ever had a teenager in their household knows, is not really the problem either.
The problem is the construction. And the perspective. Benno and Zoe and Christopher, otherwise it wouldn’t be a crime film, but a rather bland social play from “The Secret Lives of Our Children”, got involved with a person who anyone with even two years of media experience would find suspicious. Because they need money.
But not to save the world again for a moment, but to see something else while it’s still standing. They are outraged by the lack of understanding for their veganism, but operate in the best hedonistic manner with cryptocurrency, hire themselves out as drug couriers for money, dream of YouTube careers and a life other than the bourgeois existence their parents got entangled in. In principle, that would be sympathetic if the cold, not cool kids somehow touched you. But they don’t.
And Nessie shows up
So that the fate of Mirjam and Paul gains depth and rises above the circle of suspects, Astrid Ströher’s script, which is rich in relationships to the point of vomiting and bursting with side issues (racism, single parents, secret homosexuality, mafia), also ties a refrigerator to Franziska Tobler’s back.
Her niece Vanessa, called Nessie (!), shows up because her parents suck. But all of a sudden (there is pizza with cheese!), the vegan doesn’t think her formerly cool aunt is cool anymore. And does and thinks like Benno and Zoe do and think. “Only we grass dachshunds keep trying with honest work,” says Frieder Berg.
Which brings us to the perspective. It is of such condescending rudeness that one would voluntarily turn 17 again if one could, out of protest and not to be counted in the camp of the dilettante legal guardians in her life.
You wouldn’t have wanted that before “The Secret Life of Our Children”. “The Secret Lives of Our Children” is quite a frightening film.
#Tatort #Parents #stupid #children