Ein Man running through the forest. It’s one of those forests around Berlin that people are afraid of, because that’s where Feme murders like to happen in films. The light breaks in the branches. The man looks like he’s seen a ghost, like he has voices in his head.
You hardly hear anything. A fourteen-year-old suddenly stands there between the trees. And then suddenly gone again. The man in the forest is called Robert Karow. The boy in the forest was himself.
Then the sound is turned up. And there’s a corpse. Fake shot, corners of mouth slashed. A classic Feme murder, says the inspector.
You already know that “Das Victim” will not become a classic “crime scene”. Did you know beforehand. “The Victim” is a transitional case, as sometimes happens in “Tatort”. One from the dramaturgical no man’s land. Between the death of colleague Nina Rubin, which is one of the stories in the head of Robert Karow who are chasing him, and Susanne Bonard taking office.
Only in such transit zones is something like “The Sacrifice” possible. Which is really a shame. Because it serves to find the truth about characters. “The Victim” is an undercover investigation by Karow against himself. A journey into the underground of Robert Karow. In what makes him special. And what he keeps under lock and key, because in the system in which he works, the form of masculinity, of male desire, which he would like to live not only covertly, is not exactly career-promoting.
Only the truth counts
Robert Karow knows the dead man from the forest. His name was Mike. He used to live across the street when Karow was fourteen and he looked like the boy in the woods. Back when the East was still the East. They sat – they are seen again and again in slightly sepia-toned flashbacks – side by side on the curb.
That must have been in the mid-eighties. Then they got closer. And Karow’s father, a tough dog, hit the boy when he tried to deny what one perhaps no longer needs to deny today. That they kissed, Maik and Robert.
And then he said the sentence that drove Karow and probably Susanne Bonard insane: “The truth is the only thing that counts in life.”
Maik was an undercover agent. The fact that Robert hasn’t seen his first love for thirty years, in the same city, in the same job, is one of the very few discolored passages in this otherwise fabulously convoluted case. Maik was scheduled for the Berlin underground great Mesut Ünes. Snuck into his nightclub network, drove prostitutes for him, was a go-around girl. And he called himself Robert.
Erol Yesilkaya wrote The Sacrifice. He’s a great genre juggler, a master of non-genuine crime storytelling. “The Victim” isn’t just about a street mutt investigator, he’s a street mutt Fall. History of murder, history of structure, history of society, history of double identities. And of course a clan story.
One about how the mafia system works. And what limits it sets, what lies it demands of those who want to dominate it. Ultimately, it is said, mafia-like structures in all countries, in all cultures, are based on the same principles: “Everything is based on trust, respect, honor, strength and fear – macho bullshit, but reliable.” Reliable in that, of course , as it eats up those who violate principles. And against the macho bullshit.
And Robert becomes Maik
That’s how Robert sits in Maik’s apartment, which is lit up in topaz green – director Stefan Schaller lets the colors tell the story of this story of twilight, of discord, just as exemplary as the light and the music and all the trades in general. At Maik’s kitchen table. Read Maik’s Investigation Journal, an underground log. Drinks his whiskey. Smokes his cigarettes. Wearing black sweatpants and a bomber jacket from the eighties (Berlin’s mafia macho society is something of the eighties, but that’s just by the way). And Robert becomes Maik.
Maik (Andreas Pietschmann)
Source: rbb/Stefan Erhard
Which brings us to Andreas Pietschmann, who is Maik, and Mark Waschke, who is Robert. They are very similar, they both have this deeply sad look, this aura of melancholy. How they keep correspondence, how Stefan Schaller stages a soul mate beyond death and the sadness that she is finally lost makes “The Victim” (even the title is a masterpiece of ambiguity) – one should actually be careful with these predictions be – a classic of the “Tatort” story.
This also applies to the emotional force with which Mark Waschke throws himself into this physical and mental stress test, into the underground of this Robert Karow. Perhaps the most dazzling of all “crime scene” investigators. A character who has always played undercover with himself, rampaging between sociopathy and empathy, wandering between the sexes. “The Sacrifice” is also the story of the incarnation of Robert Karow. You almost want to hug him at the end.
By the way, the first case of Karow and Bonard is called “Nothing but the truth”. And truth, as we now know at the latest, is the only thing that counts in life.