No one can reveal how this case ends
They would love to love each other: Martina Bönisch (Anna Schudt) and Peter Faber (Jörg Hartmann)
Which: WDR/Bavaria Fiction/Thomas Kost
Inspectors Bönisch and Faber have been investigating in Dortmund for ten years. They went through trauma together – and were not allowed to come together. “Love me” is the name of her spectacular anniversary case. How it turns out should not be revealed here.
DThis text was written out of a certain emergency. We had to dig deep in the closet and pull out a t-shirt that we thought we had long forgotten. And then we had to wear it to write.
It’s been 15 years since we were sent a T-shirt for the last volume of Harry Potter. It said: “I’m not a final traitor”. Did we stick to it then? Let’s stick to it this time too. Because the WDR wanted that. But the need is greater because the t-shirt and body size are, well… We don’t want to give away a conclusion.
This time it’s regarding the Dortmund “Tatort” team. Bönisch and Faber and Pawlak and Herzog. And regarding “love me”. This is the anniversary case for Bönisch and Faber. The two of them – Jörg Hartmann and Anna Schudt – have been getting along with each other for ten years now. Which wasn’t that easy. Everything flew through the air.
Faber – the traumatized, the mourning – did things that would have fired any decent chief inspector long ago. Bönisch put up with it. Because they love each other. Bönisch and Faber. But don’t want to admit it. At least not in words. Yes, in gestures and looks.
Now they are standing there – Faber has overcome his trauma and is at peace with himself. Traumatized, pursued by the lovesick pathologist Haller, whom she dumped, who stalks her, now bullies, is Böhnisch. She does what Faber usually does. She riots, lashes out.
And then she reenacts a crime, as Faber used to do. Women were killed and laid in a burial forest. Dressed up, put in a nineties dress, made up, strangled. A new body every year. Every year on the same day.
“What do you want from me”
There is red wine. Bönisch’s apartment is midnight blue. The women all looked like Böhnisch. But she doesn’t want to admit that for a long time.
“What do you want from me?” Bönisch asks Faber in the role-playing game, in which role boundaries are blurred. “Why are you holding me? Will you sleep with me?” They circle each other. The looks cross. There is a lot of silence.
“I’d like to,” says Faber. He was never that honest, he never dared to be. And eventually they kiss. You can reveal that without the WDR ripping off your final betrayer shirt.
A decade of dancing has come to an end. You can already see them hand in hand investigating the setting sun. But – ah. Let’s pull ourselves together.
“Love me” is a fabulous “crime scene”. Jürgen Werner wrote it, he actually invented the Dortmund “crime scene”. Torsten C. Fischer directed.
Werner put a package on the shoulders of everyone in the team. Böhnisch her obsessive-compulsive ex-lover. Pawlak, the mother of his child, who is now in jail, while Pawlak and his daughter are sitting in front of the prison wall, like the family of the GEZ objector used to be. Herzog approaches her mother, who wants to get out of the RAF’s remnants. Only Faber seems to glide weightlessly over everything, through everything.
A dollhouse that’s a death row
And it’s always love. maternal love above all. The love of mothers, the love for mothers. About missing mothers. Mothers who abandoned children.
You see a doll’s house at the beginning. With birthday cake. Brightly colored, tight. The dollhouse keeps coming back. It’s a death row.
For a good hour, “Love Me” pretends to be an ordinary whodunnit. With a funeral home where nothing is right. With siblings who are downright bloody bloody.
Then everything turns into horror. But we can’t write anything regarding that. And now this damned column is finally over. And we are allowed to put on a matching t-shirt once more.