2023-09-17 10:46:44
There are moments in German Sunday evening crime dramas when a sentence from the script jumps out at you and speaks to your soul: “Please don’t give me another lecture” is what Johanna Wokalek says in the first Munich “Polizeiruf” as Inspector Cris Blohm.
The sentence jumps out at you when “Little Boxes” is only halfway over. And from what you’ve heard up to that point, which is probably supposed to be a satire of society (ergo: funny and enlightening) and a big grotesque theater of discourse, your head is spinning so much that you want to run screaming to the nearest Oktoberfest. You quickly understood what the intellectual drama written by Stefan Weigl and directed by Dror Zahavi was getting at.
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The case is this: A man is running through a hallway. He has panic in his eyes. He is not feeling good. Soon afterwards he lies naked on the grass in front of the Institute for Postcolonial Studies at the University of Munich. And someone wrote “Rapist” on his back in blood red.
“Why not rapists,” asks an investigator. “Because there wasn’t enough space,” says the pathologist. Sometimes “Little Boxes” is very funny. But not for long, because this Sunday evening crime thriller wants to poke fun at the ideological obstinacy, the almost dictatorial state-within-a-state behavior of the radical minority, gender and women’s protectors at the universities that dominate them, like George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth World of “1984”.
Cris Blohm is sent into a world that never tires of emphasizing that she has just returned from a foreign assignment that is stranger to her than, let’s say, Mali. A word from the way, that’s how the opinion mechanism works, and you hang on to the next debate tree. To avoid misunderstanding each other, the hornet’s nest that is this debate tree cannot be poked often enough. The question is how and with what. But maybe more on that later.
Proofs? Why do you need evidence?
The dead in front of the institute were made impossible by a blog that no one knows or wants to know anymore and that someone has deleted. In it, the man with migrant roots is said to have been called a rapist by a woman. There is no trace of the woman. There was no evidence.
You don’t need it either. “We don’t question a woman’s feelings,” says the institute’s women’s representative in her lecture. “We don’t make a woman a victim a second time by questioning her credibility.” Whereupon the representative of the constitutional state in which she lives, the black, gay, always perfectly dressed senior inspector and Blohm colleague Otto Ikwuakwu, gave her a small one Gives a lecture on the meaning of the presumption of innocence.
“If you prefer a legal system,” says Otto Ikuakwu, “in which the state doesn’t have to prove a crime and the accused doesn’t get legal representation, then I know of a few countries to leave. But I’m pretty sure you don’t want to go there.”
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This is how the Munich “Polizeiruf 110” becomes
This is how the mechanics of “Little Boxes” work. The police, these servants of the system that no one at the university likes, get bloody brains out of the wall of wordy, discourse-hardened concealment of all the background to the murder. Stephan Weigl put it together beautifully and hung it with lots of little pieces of paper from the cutting service for particularly crazy acts of gender research thinking and speech.
And the commissioners speak against it – for themselves, for each other and for us and for those who consider them enemies in “Little Boxes” – and in their deployment in intellectual foreign countries they focus less on the “perpetrator” responsible for the murder, than the rest of common sense, from which this intellectual scene – at least in the circus-ready form presented here – has distanced itself planet-wide.
The fact that no Sunday evening crime team has yet been sent to this small-minded village can come as a surprise given the overall coverage of society at this time slot. There are a few reasons why you won’t be very happy in the “Little Boxes”.
And then there are those superiors!
For a university business satire, the case is too predictable from the start and – perhaps they didn’t want too much of the famous applause from the wrong corner – not bad enough. Which, strangely enough, is also expressed in a lurching course both aesthetically and in terms of staging. From the small mental boxes, the inspectors, who are very concerned with human contours, are exclusively bombarded by mechanical figures, by chirping machines of gender speech, with speech acts that sound too serious to be funny.
The fact that there are now two new investigators working in the always experimental Munich “Polizeiruf” headquarters (Stephan Zinner’s Inspector Eden, Blohm and Ikwuakwu have taken over from Blohm’s predecessor Bessie Eyckhoff), doesn’t exactly contribute to the straightforwardness of the narrative. Cris and Otto dance around each other in the best buddy movie style, get caught up, explain each other, and a lot of effort goes into revealing as many of the two’s psychological depths and biographical puzzles as possible.
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„Charity“-Star Franz Hartwig
But no matter how hard Johanna Wokalek and Bless Amada try, they remain (still) half-lit shadows at best. They still don’t deserve the fact that they have to deal with ridiculously gender-biased superiors who take a top spot on the rather large scale of horror of dysfunctional police councilors and department heads.
There are very beautiful moments. When – completely without any approach or preparation – Dennis Eden once plays “Ebony and Ivory” by Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney in the police station and swings around between the tables with Otto Ikwuakwu (Bless Amada is really a gifted dancer). When a reporter in front of the camera asks Blohm’s boss whether she is afraid of old white men and she bursts out: “Ask a reporter from Bayerischer Rundfunk of all people!”
In the end, the story suddenly and unexpectedly turns into a truly touching tragedy. But by then it’s too late.
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