TV series "The Protocolist": Gray Mouse becomes a vengeful angel

Gloomy: How do crimes affect those who need to enlighten them (in the photo, Iris Berben in the role of protocol designer Freya Becker)? (Photo: PD)

So faded that here you have never seen Iris Berben. At the Cannes Film Festival, where "Die Protokollantin" was presented in the spring, the Great Lady of German TV actresses quickly presented a glamorous first, as if to briefly show: "Look, it's me" .

The filmmaker Nina Grosse provides the actress here (according to an idea of ​​the perpetrator Friedrich Ani) a deeper female role than the one usually offered by the German game show. That any one is turned to goodness and that it turns into evil – such an ambivalence of character was until then a rather masculine domain. Grosse had so in the development of the figure, according to their own protagonists of multilayered and dark cinema, as Isabelle Huppert ("She") in the inner eye.

Crime and punishment

And Iris Berben is well aware of this: during the day, her anti-heroin at the police station tacitly records the interrogations through which crimes must be solved in the man, to reveal at night a strange double life. vengeful angel.

Halbseiden: Moritz Bleibtreu plays the little brother of Freya Becker (Iris Berben). (Photo: PD)

Nobody should expect a reader of the type "4 blocks" or "Babylon Berlin". It's not the daily entertainment that offers this (in other roles with Peter Kurth and Moritz Bleibtreu very busy) five hours, because the Crimean character presents an interesting way of knowing what effect the crimes have on those who have need to enlighten. Freya Becker hears cases of child abuse, murder and grievous bodily harm every day. The clerk knows all the bad excuses, the bottomless self-justifications, the cheap lies; They have eaten this woman from the inside for decades.

How long can you bear such a thing? Especially since the daughter of Freya has been missing for ten years and that the mother maintains a strange denial of reality, where she continues to maintain the apartment of her daughter, as if she would come back tomorrow. Iris Berben convincingly embodies this figure which lacks justice in the world – a feeling of loneliness. "I do not belong anymore," she says to her cat, with whom she talks a lot.

Strong: Peter Kurth. (Photo: PD)

The woman, not faded, posed, harmless, gray-haired, who is wearing this woman, contrasts sharply with Freya's inner conviction that she must, if necessary, establish balance in this world, the "just punishment" ". The new (Peter Kurth), who takes the reins of the police station, conducted the investigation in the case of Freya's daughter at that time and knows him well. The two are getting closer, which finally gives this existential drama the greatest possible tragedy.

The film is a long calm river

The noble distance, which distinguishes the series on four episodes, brings the plate Showdown but there. In the end, everything looks more like the second German TV (ZDF) than it breathes French melancholy, which you have apparently tried to breathe into the long narrative narrative.

The ZDF wants to master the balancing of this series: keep the gray-haired audience in front of the screen while addressing a younger serial audience, which is why the five parts are already proposed in the media library the day before the first broadcast on television. Is it good for generations to be reunited at the campfire of television? But is also a sign of commitment to the usual convention. In the brownish grime of the Berlin Police Station, in which there seems to be no window, the investigators seem to be buried alive soon.