“No one has yet succeeded in proving with certainty that the Berlin Wall fell because the East German government did not find any other solution to prevent David Hasselhoff, the secret weapon of the West, to sing his hit longer Looking for Freedom”, kidding Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The American actor and singer’s hymn to freedom (who has distant German origins) indeed accompanied Berliners throughout 1989 – for better or for worse.
Far-fetched, this hypothesis? “With its pseudo-historical series in the 1980s sauce, Netflix shows us a much more crazy reality”, immediately adds the Frankfurt daily.
Between thriller, comedy and grotesque
On August 19, the streaming platform uploaded a new German series, Cleo. It features a young spy, Kleo Straub (Jella Haase), who works for the East German secret service, the Stasi. His ultra-confidential missions consist of infiltrating the West to execute enemies of the regime. But in 1987 her world collapsed: she was sentenced to life in prison for treason, a charge she disputed. Behind bars, she loses the baby she was carrying.
Comes the fall of the Wall. Kleo regains freedom. “The baby-faced killer”, according to the formula of Taggesspiegel, has only one obsession in mind: to find those responsible for his incarceration, and to take revenge. “Here, no debauchery of violence in the way Kill Bill, but the heroine deploys treasures of inventiveness to assassinate her victims”, writes the Berlin daily. The latter is seduced by the performance of the actress who, borrowing from the register of comedy and the grotesque, “defuses the gravity of the murder scenes”… and reveals a creative use of the mortadella slice.
The East German version of “Kill Bill”
“The Stasi had already been approached from the angle of documentary, melodrama and comedy, it only lacked the burlesque vendetta”, analyzes for its part the Berliner Zeitung. It is now done with Cleo, new creation by the HaRiBo trio – Hanno Hackfort, Richard Kropf and Bob Konrad, known among others for 4 Blocks, a series on the Lebanese clans of the capital.
“From the first minutes, we can see that the series seeks less to explore the dramatic aspect than to offer a new emblematic character on German television”, acquiesces the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in another post: “a rebel with socialist superpowers, who could be the daughter of Nina Hagen and Uma Thurman. A kind of Beatrix Kiddo [le personnage qu’interprète Uma Thurman dans Kill Bill] straight out of East Berlin, in full German reunification.”
Kleo will go so far as to ring the doorbell of Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, in person, observes Die Tageszeitung. History buffs, move on, or go back to see the excellent Deutschland 83, one of the first German series to have gone back in time. “We are not in the Stasi archives but on Netflix”, warns the Berliner Zeitung. The former East Berlin daily would like to point out that the greeting of the young East German pioneers that the heroine ironically performs in several scenes is “poorly executed”. The hand would be incorrectly positioned.
The West is tart, the East greyish
Kill Bill, Nikita, Atomic Blonde… In the German press, comparisons with earlier series and films abound, which is not necessarily a good sign as to the originality of Cleo. The British-American Series Killing Eve is also cited as a reference, with her goofy killer character.
Some daily newspapers, such as The world, appreciate in Cleo a series “tasty”, well acted and mixing action and comedy. For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, however, this is not enough:
“At first very amusing, the heroine’s wanderings in the ruins of her past life end up becoming as boring as a tourist trip in a Trabant.”
The German edition of Rolling Stone deplores the clichés that are abused Cleo in his 1980s reenactment: “The West is filled with tart hues, while the East is bathed in grayish sadness.”
“Despite its obvious big ambitions, the series is not really successful”, concludes Die Tageszeitung. “If only it didn’t smell like full-nose Netflix production, sigh for his part Rolling Stone. The writers have obviously mixed up all the miracle recipes of the genre. It feels like a mix of Killing Eve and of Deutschland 83.”