High-flying boulevard – Weekend – Kommersant
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The fourth season of the Babylon-Berlin series is being released on Kinopoisk, where an ominous portrait of a neurotic society is born from a tabloid plot. Germany between the two world wars appears here besotted with a viscous haze, when a fascist state is born out of poverty and despair, economic collapse and political chaos.
When Fritz Lang made crime thrillers about the Mabuse hypnotist gang or space fiction about the first flight to the moon, he wanted to deliver first-class entertainment to the public. But it turned out that in these films the spirit of the times was reflected in the most frightening way. A hundred years later, Babylon Berlin, Germany’s most decadent series, reverently picks up Lang’s motifs.
The fourth part of the story about the adventures of the Berlin detective Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) begins on New Year’s Eve 1931. The sweet-voiced singer (Max Raabe) brings the hypnotic haunting melody “Ein Tag wie Gold” from the stage of the Moka Efti club: “The day is like gold, and the night is like velvet and silk, two steps to the left, and then back and forth. Hello Moscow, Paris and Vienna, we were born to dance – maybe we are crazy? Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries) of the CID dances to this song in a record store. Little does she know that in a week she will be fired and will dance for twenty hours in Moka Efti in a dance marathon to win the top prize of a thousand marks, until her less hardy rivals collapse from overwork. Charlotte’s sister Toni (Irene Böhm), who lives on the street with a gang of homeless people, and an accomplice will climb into a luxury department store on New Year’s Eve, but a daring robbery will fail due to a police raid. That same evening, NSDAP stormtroopers led by Walter Stennes (Hanno Koffler) will stir up a bloody brawl in the streets and smash the windows of Jewish shops. But the police prefer not to interfere. Only after one of the thieves falls from the roof of the store and breaks to death, the investigator and Charlotte arrive at the call. And there Charlotte will see her romantic hero Gereon in a bandage with a swastika in a crowd of drunken stormtroopers.
On the same New Year’s Eve, the wealthy industrialist Nissen (hit into a wild eccentric and almost caricatured Lars Eidinger) will give his bride a giant Blue Goldstein diamond and launch his first rocket into the air – he cherishes the dream of flying to the moon, only for some reason he consults with engineers about whether it is possible to equip rockets with explosive devices. Before the launch, the merry guests will chorus: “Five-four-three-two-one…” Here the authors of “Babylon-Berlin” Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Henrik Handlögten make a deep curtsy to Fritz Lang – it was he who invented the countdown before the launch for the film The Woman in the Moon, which came out in 1929, a year before the start of the fourth season. The image of the genius of the underworld Mabuse, a hypnotist doctor who mastered the minds of lumpen and aristocrats, is also rethought in the series: this is the sinister Dr. Schmidt (Jens Harzer), who in the new season will test the effect of Pervitin first on animals, and then on people. This drug gives the fighter dementia and courage: a small ferret under its action is able to bite a wolf, and a feeble evil guy can defeat a powerful enemy.
The producers of the series, led by Tykwer, plan to shoot another, fifth season and end the action in 1933 – they definitely do not want to deal with Hitler who came to power. But the author of the series of novels about Gereon Rath, the Cologne detective Volker Kutscher wants to hold out the story until 1938 to show how Germany came to war. This season, its prerequisites are already pecking. In Berlin of the 1931 model, life is not easy for a small person. The economy is ruined, journalists are imprisoned for treason (a separate story of the season is dedicated to the journalist Katelbach, who published an article about the secret rearmament of the army), the court and the police are corrupt. A secret organization “White Hand” is operating all over Germany, headed by a crazy judge who declared a hunt for homeless children and imagined himself to be a punishing god, and mafia “wrestling clubs” from former prisoners are gaining strength in the capital. Moscow has not done without greetings either: the new season of the series is habitually flooded with Russians who are spying on the Nemetchyna on the eve of a new war (Stirlitz, apparently, is already walking along the same streets, not thinking about seconds down).
From all this motley criminal and espionage boulevard with a dozen intertwining plots, a story suddenly emerges that a person is always inclined to step on the same rake: he wants to rise from the abyss of economic and political chaos with the help of a strong hand and a new war.
Watch: “Kinopoisk”
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