Preview of the “Tatort” from Zurich on Sunday, March 13: That’s what it’s about
Because the city likes to be quiet, even if the lake in the middle is throwing waves and it’s under a dark sky, as the pictures keep telling us from time to time, Zurich needs an outlet for the causes. The investigators Tessa Ott (Carol Schuler) and Isabelle Grandjean (Anna Pieri Zuercher) are also under pressure, often a pinched look, like a little irritation that doesn’t want to go outside because the facade is important in the job as a commissioner: confidently through walk the morass, even if the soul shakes.
The valve is quickly found in the Swiss “Tatort” episode “Schattenkinder” (Sunday, March 13, 8:15 p.m. in the first). On the one hand there are tattoos that lie on the skin like a rash, on the other hand it is the old villa, used as a cultural center, where these tattooed “children” live, they have long been of age, which is reported here (book: Stefanie Veith and Nina Vukovic, Director: Christine Repond).
That’s a tradition in Zurich, where the “Rote Fabrik” was such a left-wing meeting place in the 1980s, at the time when the “Schattenkinder” presented their open drug scene like a punch in the face of the city. The tension between fear and comfortable money can still be felt today. If you walk through Zurich, you will see psychotherapy practices here in high concentrations, as well as the old, secretive banks.
An artist like a cult leader
Seen in this way, it is not surprising that the detectives have to solve the murder of a young man who escaped from home, although and precisely because emotionally, home never existed. The mother is gone, the father (Imanuel Humm) makes a name for himself as a solvent doctor, always thinking about the next patient. Max (Vincent Furrer), his son, also becomes a patient over the years, never taken seriously by the father, abused early on by the swimming teacher (Marcus Mislin) – the father will compensate for this abuse with therapies for the son, one, another and always more. The father does not specifically mention the sexual assault; he regards his son in general and vaguely as “unstable”. But because the father knows about his own failure, he provides Max with strong stuff, pills and tablets, freehand and without a prescription.
There we have it again, the Zurich triad of drug scene, left-wing cultural center and shocked parents who want to numb it all with a lot of money. Max seeks refuge with Kyomi (Sarah Hostettler), who has a day-to-day life as queen and artist in the old mansion. She forms the “shadow children” who follow her into “objects”, stretches them over them for video installations, tattoos them on their faces, on their foreheads, on their larynx, under anesthesia even on the eyeballs, in order to erase any remnant of bourgeois convention. She takes away their senses: Thinking, speaking, looking, it’s all in the mistress’ hands now.
A corpse hanging from the ceiling as if staged
Max’s father is lured into a warehouse, where he sees his son hanging dead from a rope, wrapped in nylon, tied into a cocoon. It’s eerily staged, overflowing with pathos, as unfortunately happens in films that don’t really wake up in terms of the narrative and then hit the drum with a bang, as if they had to wake themselves up. The same goes for the episode “Schattenkinder”.
Inspector Ott has “a problem with weapons”, as she says herself, which is not so good as a police officer – she is afraid of being fired because she fired too early on an old assignment. Now her colleague Isabelle Grandjean still has to certify that, despite the offense, she remains fit for service as a commissioner. But the colleague adorns herself with the charter. Also, because Ott quite openly has sympathies for the artist Kyomi, who makes it clear to sensible people to relieve them of their own problems. But Kyomi also has a “thing going” that goes well with Zurich. A city that gets into trouble in the new “Tatort” episode when it simply picks up stories from the street without exaggerating or brooding over them.