2023-04-23 12:37:14
Liebe is a murderous feeling. Sometimes. can become one Stories of affection turning to hate, to love, to pain, then to violence, lie behind most of the crime statistics for homicides.
But sometimes you don’t see these stories straight away, you can’t read them. Love is also a secret feeling. Sometimes. There is a beautiful biblical word for love. There is talk of recognizing each other when two people find each other.
“Love is Pain” is the name of the new case for the Dortmund team. It was written by 4Blocks and Kleo creators Bob Konradt and Hanno Hackford. Sabine Bernardi from the “Red Ribbon Club” directed it. The aggregate states of love hold him together, melancholy and anger, despair and sadness and hate, pain and shame, mutual recognition and acknowledgment. You only realize how much at the end.
In the beginning, a man slaughters the driver in a Dortmund tram. He wears a hoodie, a baseball cap, and keeps his face in their shadow. It would be easy to just disappear like that. But this man stands under the surveillance camera of the car, looks in, points his finger at a tear he has had tattooed under his right eye. This man doesn’t just want to be seen, he wants to be recognized. We all know his face. We don’t know his story.
Again and again the camera makes us responsible as inspectors. We monitor Dortmund, we see people running across squares, through streets, towards houses. We should recognize something on them, find the culprit. The colors change from the gray-blue of the surveillance camera scenes to the strange sepia of Philipp Sichler’s images. You have never seen so much Dortmund in the Dortmund “crime scene”. You’ve never seen a “crime scene” like this before anyway. “Love is Pain” is a big-city tale, a tale from a metropolis under surveillance. But that’s just by the way.
Find each other: The Dortmund team Jan Pawlak (Rick Okon), Peter Faber (Jörg Hartmann, M.) and Rosa Herzog (Stefanie Reinsperger)
Which: WDR/Martin Rottenkolber
A second man is stabbed. Again the hoodie, again the baseball cap. Again the look into the camera and the sign. The story gradually takes shape. A youth gang in Dortmund. The two victims of the Nameless belonged to her. Another is in a vegetative state after having an allegedly autoerotic accident. A friend is sitting by the bed with a face like a guilt complex. The killer plays with Faber’s people.
Although these are no longer Faber’s people. For the first time since the death of Bönisch, his beloved colleague, he is back on duty. But first of all, Rosa Herzog is in charge of the homicide department. She apologizes right away. Faber supposedly doesn’t give a damn, and Herzog doesn’t mind. The grief makes him mild, his cynicism lies under a surprising cotton ball of empathy.
The man becomes human. He wouldn’t break sinks out of any toilet walls today. He would talk to the sink first. Let’s see how long this lasts. He’s still wearing the parka. If he takes that off and puts on a jacket, we’ll worry.
Completely new investigation methods
However, the horizontal plot threads of the three investigators are stretched a bit woodenly through the story. All of them have to do with love. And they all painfully rub the souls of Faber, Herzog and Pawlak. He is fighting with his mother-in-law for custody of his daughter. Herzog is haunted again by her mother, the terrorist. And Faber places cacti next to the eternal light for Bönisch in the church. Everyone has to make decisions.
A super recognizer is hired, a face seeker. She follows the perpetrator from one camera to the next, finding him in hidden objects. As far as investigative methods are concerned, the Dortmund team seems to have attended a course in recent months. Everything else is classic police work, researching biographies, following lifelines, kicking in doors.
After an hour, the identity of the man who is moving through Dortmund as if on a crusade is clear. But because everyone who knows him is silent, the investigation proceeds at a very carefully accelerating, decelerating, always sucking pace.
A face finds its story. A team finds its spirit. A future after Bönisch is possible.
#crime #scene #monitored #city #murderer