Investigator Moormann’s trauma licks strawberry ice cream and a mother shoots herself to save her children. All signs point to unrequited love.
Liv Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) has to face her confusing memories triggered by the dead man’s neighbor Gernot Schaballa (Aljoscha Stadelmann).
His stomach is bulging out of his track pants, his undershirt is dirty, he has the face of a drooling giant baby. And he holds the strawberry ice cream, which he keeps sucking like a mother’s thumb, right in front of the investigator Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer): “Would you like to bite?”
No invitation to dinner was ever so tenderly missed in a “crime scene” episode. And hardly a reaction so disgusted. Moormann is triggered by the sight of the wild guy, she falls back into a childhood trauma. Was there something about an old man that this one looks like?
If the actor Aljoscha Stadelmann didn’t exist, this “crime scene” would be poorer for the popular figure. In Moormann’s memory, he is the giant child with a secret, and in the apartment building where he reports an apartment fire, he plays the neglected philanthropist who stinks right into the viewer’s living room. In both roles he provides a warm feeling, no matter how cold the film is.
Love is the best poison
Freezing cold is the operating temperature here. Director Anne Zohra Berrached loves society’s losers and outsiders. Love, in high doses, can be deadly, she says. Her story is as wacky as the narration.
Sybille Dobeleit (left) seems to have placed her life entirely in her husband’s hands.
The apartment fire, which is why the investigators are called, escalates into the kidnapping of a child and the case of a mentally damaged mother. Bizarrely, she says goodbye to her children: in her wedding dress, she sets fire to her belongings and shoots herself.
And that’s not enough for the eccentricity: she leaves the cryptic message on the ceiling: “The devil speaks to you through the walls.” Moormann’s colleague Linda Selb (Luise Wolfram) understands the characters as a “work order”, after all, the devil is an opponent you don’t meet every day. But behind which wall is which Satan sitting?
Emancipation, pretty perverse
The milieus of the people are gloomy and broken, strong light and strong shadows show them in their mental misery and in their loneliness. In stills, the camera (Christian Huck) freezes them, zombies. Is all of this cult, art or co-color?
Neither nor. “Love Rage” shows how acting stars create suffering people from artificial characters. Aljoscha Stadelmann is wonderfully squandered, and Matthias Matschke, as the father of a child who wants to make two families happy, is really upset. Dirk Martens turns the pedophile caretaker of a school into a miserable figure with class. And Ulrike Krumbiegel as the hussy wife of a tyrant will surprise everyone in the end. After all, her step is neither art nor gibberish, but a tangible emancipation.
“Tatort” from Bremen: “Love Rage”, Sunday, May 29, 8:05 p.m./8:15 p.m., SRF 1 / ARD.