“Crime Scene: What Remains” with Franziska Weisz and Wotan Wilke Möhring

Danniversary in the “Tatort” from Hamburg and a farewell: The New Year’s case “What Remains” is the thirteenth “Tatort” with Franziska Weisz in the role of federal police officer Julia Grosz, and it is her last. In 2016, in “Wrath of God”, the collaboration with the taciturn Thorsten Falke (Wotan Wilke Möhring) began at Hanover Airport. Then she knocked him down first. At the time, she was looking for a new job after a traumatizing assignment abroad; he was struggling with a loss of trust after saying goodbye to another partner.

They slowly moved towards each other

They slowly moved towards each other over the next few years. A basic vibration of intimacy skepticism remained, like the question “Who was I and who do I want to be?” In “Shadow Life,” Grosz investigated under an assumed identity in a left-wing housing project – and dealt with her beginnings as a police officer. The past also always played a role for Falke.

Franziska Weisz leaves the Hamburg “crime scene,” but not without showing new facets of her character. She sings and makes several appearances. Your commissioner _,Grosz seems more relaxed and gives Falke professional compliments from the stage at his 25th service anniversary celebration in a bar in St. Pauli that sound like a declaration of love. For him, what counts first is the person, then the action. Falke is “the best cop she knows.” That's saying something.

Again it's about identity

The case itself comes full circle. Again it's about identity, about belonging as a prerequisite for integration. It's about an investigation in which Falke's “helper syndrome” comes into play, as well as the fatigue that arises when others put too much hope in you. Especially refugees, for whom Falke's heart has always beaten. Twenty years ago, as a young police officer, he taught boxing to the children of Bosnian war refugees in a Billstedt youth center. “I liked them all,” he says.

Most of them had to leave the country after their toleration expired and move to a country they did not know. Falke finds photos from before and he remembers the promise. The aim was to find right-wing extremist perpetrators who set the meeting place on fire in 2002. A child died in the arson attack. He was unable to identify the culprit. He wasn't even responsible. But what did that matter to people like Falke and the boy who idolized him back then?

“What Remains” begins with a magnificent opening sequence lasting several minutes, filmed quickly without a single cut (camera Frank Küpper). A certain Enzo Malotti (Malik Blumenthal) tries to buy a fake passport in the back room when a task force storms a Hamburg neighborhood bar. In the general chaos, the man, whose real name is Denis Demirovic, flees past Grosz and Falke (“Do we know him?”). Later, as Grosz sings her “Seven Nations Army,” that man, Malotti, Demirovic, or whoever it is, moves Falke to a meeting at a skate park. He desperately asks for help. Falke doesn't recognize him; it's only when the man is recovered dead from the harbor basin the next day that it dawns on Falke.

Traces lead to a refugee initiative, whose exhausted founder Katharina Timmig (Leslie Malton) – “I can't hear the word help anymore” – has the “Woyzeck” rehearsed again (apparently the only socially critical piece that the “crime scene” knows about for its viewers trustworthy, it also played a role for the people of Cologne). Together with her husband Björn (Gerhard Garbers), Timmig runs the site; it was founded shortly after the fire in Billstedt. Both were, as only the viewer knows, threatened by the dead stranger, just like their son Oliver (Hanno Koffler), who seems to be enacting a bourgeois life with his wife Jasmina (Janina Elkin).

The search for the perpetrator is once again about fragile identity, about self-discovery, about wrong and right in living together. Falke's boys, who had to return to Bosnia with their parents; crooked dealings that are connected to Timmig's refugee initiative (and which are only hinted at here); Overwhelm, portrayed by Leslie Malton; Falke's failure to recognize a driven man and, above all, his late arrival at the end – this adds up to a “crime scene” that leaves only sadness.

“What Remains” is a “Neo Noir” genre piece directed by Max Counte and written by Marija Erceg with a sense of the identity question of refugees. Florian Tessloff's accompanying composition, recorded by the NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, provides the appropriately dark program music. We will miss Franziska Weisz as the committed police officer Julia Grosz, who was allowed to be relaxed and radiant here.

The Crime scene: What remains broadcasts the first on January 1st at 8:15 p.m. It will then be available in the ARD media library.