2023-09-24 12:45:40
If you get lost, for example in the mountains, if you don’t know what to do, it sometimes helps to take a few steps back and simply take the closest path that many people have already taken. It’s actually quite similar with storytelling. The Swiss “Tatort”, formerly based in Lucerne, was relaunched a good three years ago at least with the aim of no longer being the weakest Sunday evening crime franchise on average, is a good example.
He has now finally started in Zurich, in the metropolis, with a team of women who, at least on paper, were wonderfully beastly against each other, with Commissioner Ott and Commissioner Grandjean, the rebellious and the quiet one, the scion of the moneyed nobility and the human rights investigator, the dark one and the one Blondes. Two women who, even after three years, still address each other by their last names, like sales assistants at the supermarket checkout (unlike them, they now call each other by their first names) and, when it comes to character development, are still pretty much on the spot.
also read
What they were given to solve also made it difficult for them to live and grow together. You don’t miss Lucerne, the gray and mostly horrible place, much. But people in Zurich weren’t entirely happy either.
They were pretty wrong when it came to storytelling. There was a lot of heavy artillery – big capitalists and big crimes, often as international as the city on the Gold Coast is – – not very exciting in terms of film and often aesthetically done with a downright Lucerne gray coat. In the end, dead on the floor was not only the usual murder victim, but also a pretty small story.
It cannot necessarily be said that “Blinder Fleck”, the sixth case for Grandjean and Ott, would now thematically operate with handguns instead of the previously usual bazookas. The fact that the story, which is not a small one, ends up lying around in boring shreds, as often happens in Zurich.
Three dead in the Oberland
And now, unfortunately, we have to return briefly to the remedy for getting lost and not knowing what to do. “Blinder Fleck” – written by Claudia Pütz and Karin Heberlein, staged by “Tatort” veteran Tobias Ineichen – takes a well-known plot path in order to escape the dilemma of Zurich storytelling. One with which you can actually always reach your destination safely. Let’s call it “The Only Witness” path.
The case is as follows: A family is driving around in the forest in the beautiful Zurich Oberland. The father still has to do something. Then the idyll is over and he is already dead. And so is his mother. And a cyclist. Shot. Looks like an execution. Ella is the girl who survives. Hidden under her mother’s skirt.
Traumatized. Speechless. She does what all children in such films do, she paints. And, as all children in such films do, she is afraid of very strange things. For Ella it’s a canary. He was in the car. The bird, says Ella when she can say something again, shoots.
Now we have to get to the heavy artillery that “Blinder Fleck” also operates with and which Grandjean and Ott are only gradually getting on the trail of. Since Zurich doesn’t work without a sleazy capitalist, there’s a sleazy investor in “Blinder Fleck”. Joel Müller is the name of the anti-capitalist overhang mandate from the clichéd “crime scene” characters, and he looks exactly the same.
Commissioner Grandjean at the crime scene in the Zurich Oberland
Quelle: ARD Degeto/ SRF/S. Hlavacek
Müller wanted to sell Protected View, Marco Tomic and Julie Perrier’s company in which he was involved, to the highest bidder possible. Marco and Julie are Ella’s parents. Protected View is a startup whose last and hottest project was a software called Blind Spot, which makes it largely impossible for facial recognition programs to recognize faces.
Müller wanted to sell Protected View to, of all people, Security Rumpf, which in turn makes a lot of money producing drones for mass surveillance. A rogue who doesn’t already know what the sale is for. Drones not only provide one strand of the story, they also provide the images. They are constantly approaching, whirring through the forest, through the city, through the company corridors. Towards the people, around them. You are being targeted.
Almost as if they were playing with their own narrative cliché, Grandjean and Ott first put everything on the capital (the third dead person at Hochwacht was Tomic and Perrier’s bank advisor). However, because we are traveling through the “Blind Spot” with completely different drones, we know that Tomic is not called Tomic by chance, that there is an obscure figure who is Swiss, but used to be a mercenary in the past, thirty years to be exact Bosnian War was a pretty bad finger. And so big crime and big capital are once again entangled in Zurich.
But because everything looks better, is filmed stringently, sometimes even excitingly, you don’t sink into a Lucerne-gray sleep before it’s too late. Also because, on a very relaxed, human level, Ott, who likes to be a little scruffy, and Grandjean, who is always a little arrogant, come closer to each other without the previous artificiality.
also read
Because they discover each other’s feelings under their still paper-rustling character profile: Grandjean, the familyless one, for little Ella, who opens up to her like no one else. Ott for a man flying drones in the forest, who she at least suspects He doesn’t just let his flying objects buzz around in the Hochwacht to observe red kites.
So seeing and preventing recognition are intertwined, old and new guilt. And the question of whether a war is ever over when it is over.
It could continue like this (apart from the unfortunately unavoidable synchronization, which, as a special kind of V-effect, turns even the most realistic case into a surreal event). In the end, you have nothing against a ten-part Zurich “Tatort” series of variations on well-known narrative motifs. Maybe Ott and Grandjean should be snowed in in a high mountain village next. A kind of Helvetic Western, “The Strange Valley” reloaded, so to speak.
#Zurich #crime #scene #war #doesnt