A Woman Disappears (2012)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title A woman disappears
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2012
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director Matti Geschonneck
script Markus Busch
production Wolfgang Cimera ,
Bettina Wente
music Florian Tessloff
camera Theo Bierkens
cut Eva Schnare
occupation

A woman disappears (reference Title Bruno van Leeuwen - The City and the fear ) is a German television - thriller from Matti Geschonneck from the year 2012 . The script is based on motifs from the novel And forgive us our guilt by Claus Cornelius Fischer . Peter Haber is cast in the role of Commissioner van Leeuwen, Simone Maja Maranow as his wife and Tobias Moretti as the anthropologist Pieters .

action

13-year-old Kevin van Leer was murdered. With his skull smashed in, a gaping hole in his palate and his brain removed, his body is found in a bush in Amsterdam's Vondelpark. Commissioner Bruno van Leeuwen is to investigate the case. He has completely different problems because his 50-year-old wife Simone has Alzheimer's disease and needs care. Bruno persistently refuses to give her to the nursing home, even though he knows that Ellen, her carer, is right. But he cannot part with the love of his life; even when he finds several older love letters that reveal that Simone once cheated on him with another man. However, she can remember less and less.

While Bruno hardly gets any sleep at night because there is too much going on in his head, he has to solve the case during the day. Tic, Kevin's girlfriend calls van Leeuwen and tells him that Kevin sounded very scared in a phone call made shortly before his death. A bamboo splinter, the origin of which can be traced back to Melanesia , points the way in the right direction. Everything points to a ritual murder. Van Leeuwen asks for help from the anthropologist Josef Pieters, who has also made a name for himself with research in the field of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Alzheimer's disease. Van Leeuwen's advance in this direction comes nowhere; Pieters says that unfortunately he cannot give him any hope. Not only contradicting information from the virologist leads to a certain distrust of Van Leeuwen towards him. But there is no connection between Kevin and him. However, Pieters works in the same hospital as Kevin's mother, a surgeon.

Van Leeuwen's team investigates that Pieters once got into talk about his foundation. From Silvia Fahrendong, Pieter's former assistant, the inspector learns that Pieter's most outstanding quality is that he is not afraid of anything. Eventually Van Leeuwen breaks into Pieter's house in the hope of knowing more afterwards. He takes two different hair samples with him. Pieters denies the superintendent's direct question later asked him whether he knew Kevin, but tells him on the head that he or one of his people had illegally gained access to his house. The hair sample, which van Leeuwen cannot use, shows that a second man must have been in the Pieters house, and there are also traces of blood from the murdered Kevin in the house. The Commissioner confronts Pieters with his suspicion that Kevin saw something he was not allowed to see, namely him, Pieters, with his young lover, a boy from Papua New Guinea , whom he brought to the Netherlands as part of his foundation. He wants to know what Pieters associates with a white mask. Pieters replies that the young man is not his lover, but his son.

Van Leeuwen finds out that Pieters had applied for adoption for Keo Winter, the boy from Papua New Guinea, which was nearing completion. It was only one moment that decided Kevin's fate. The boy had had a dispute with Pieters at the hospital shortly before, and Pieters knew when Kevin saw him exchanging tenderness with Keo in the car that the adoption was in danger. This fear was written on his face and Keo did not go unnoticed. He then pursued Kevin and killed him. After he had made up his face white, he returned to his victim to extract his brain, as is the custom in his home country when someone is dead. When Van Leeuwen and his men enter the ship that belongs to Pieters, they find Keo there, white make-up and sitting next to the Pieters he has killed. Pieters wanted to protect him from prosecution and send him back to his homeland, which Keo could neither understand nor understand.

Bruno Van Leeuwen struggles to move his wife to a suitable nursing home after all. His wistful look follows Simone, who disappears into the door without turning around again.

production

Production notes, filming, role model

The crime film produced by Network Movie for ZDF was shot from April 30 to June 3, 2011 under the working title Bürger van Leeuwen - The City and Fear in Amsterdam .

Tobias' role as a researcher is based on a real role model. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek , an American who died in 2008, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine / Physiology in 1976 together with Baruch Samuel Blumberg for “the discovery of new mechanisms in the development and spread of infectious diseases” . In 1997, he was convicted of sexually abusing New Guinea and Micronesia boys who had been adopted by him.

Fear is the theme that dominates the story. Josef Pieters puts it this way in the film: “We are afraid of ourselves, of our deeper needs, of everything that is alien to us. The yoke under which we have placed ourselves for the last two, maybe even three millennia, is ultimately called the same everywhere: It is called morality. "

publication

Premiered was A woman disappears on July 2, 2012 at the Munich Film Festival . The TV first broadcast took place on October 15, 2012 on ZDF .

Studio Hamburg Enterprises released the film together with Van Leeuwen's second case, Totenengel , on DVD on August 22, 2014.

The audio description of the film, spoken by Uta Maria Torp, was nominated in 2013 for the German Audio Film Award in the "Television" category.

Other films in the series

The film, also known under the title A woman disappears - Van Leeuwen's first case , formed the prelude to the crime series broadcast on Arte in Germany and France at the same time with cases of "Commissioner van Leeuwen". The other film titles in the series are:

  • Totenengel - Van Leeuwen's second case (again directed by Matti Geschonneck), broadcast on November 4, 2013
  • Death and the Maiden - Van Leeuwen's Third Case (also Payday ) (directed by Hans Steinbichler ), aired on October 27, 2017.

reception

Audience rating

The film was seen by 5.73 million viewers when it was first broadcast, corresponding to a market share of 17.4 percent.

Reviews

The lexicon of the international film found: "Exciting, visually elaborate (television) crime thriller that does not combine the genre plot very convincingly with the melancholy, very personal drama."

The daily newspaper said: “His wife [the commissioner's wife], the film title alludes to, has Alzheimer's disease. The crime fiction wants to be more than just a crime fiction and tries to study its decay. Unfortunately the film wants too much there. [...] The end is a bit disappointing because it is badly constructed. But that's half as bad - the duel between the inspector and his diabolical antipode crackles in the scenes of their meeting exciting enough. "

Focus was ambivalent: “The film 'A woman disappears' dares a beautiful double story. There is the dead boy whose brain was removed and the wife of the investigating cop, whose brain is drowning in chaos. Diagnosis of Alzheimer's. The Commissioner is torn between the case and the private, which is realistic, interesting. But unfortunately: in the end it doesn't work. […] Matti Geschonneck's well-cast film is doing itself and the viewer a disservice because it branches too much between the cult of the dead and taboo, between crime fiction and piece of grief. More old Swede, that would have been good. "

TV Spielfilm gave one of three possible points for claim and action, two for tension and found: Matti Geschonneck [...] stages the melancholy material as an intense crime drama. Conclusion: crime ballad without any showmanship.

Rainer Tittelbach from tittelbach.tv gave four out of six possible points and wrote: “A sinister crime case and a touching medical history intertwine author Markus Busch in the ZDF crime drama 'A woman disappears' without artificially bringing them together. The bracket is the commissioner. Strong: Haber, Maranow, Moretti. Told about the pictures - rather unadorned, the colors as if washed away and that is precisely what is extremely atmospheric! "The crime drama is told" calmly ", the viewer gets" a lot of attention for 90 minutes ". The critic certified Maja Maranow that she played the wife, whose "memories are wiped out in a creeping process, great".

Michael Hanfeld reviewed the film for the FAZ and found Peter Haber, Maja Maranow and Tobias Moretti acting as if the scenes and dialogues in the script had been "written for them and only for them". Of course, “the special direction by Matti Geschonneck, the camera by Theo Bierkens and the editing by Eva Schnare” also contribute to the fact that one forgets “that there is actually being staged, shot, edited”. “If you want to see faces in a television film, read them, immerse yourself in them”, “then in this one”. The "monstrosity of the criminal case" with which the commissioner is dealing is "in no way inferior to the quiet horror of his wife's Alzheimer's disease". His “own fear and grief” are written on Bruno van Leeuwen's face “when he looks at his wife”, but he cannot defeat her.

Kino.de stated that the title rightly sounded like a crime thriller, "but Matti Geschonneck's excellently played film" is also "a carefully narrated Alzheimer's drama". The film draws its “great charm” from the mix, especially since “the personal level ultimately touches a lot more”. A woman disappears "primarily from the outstanding actors".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Media: RTL entertainment before ZDF drama “A woman disappears” see page focus.de
  2. ↑ Peter Haber - Commissioner Van Leeuwen: A woman disappears / Angel of the Dead Fig. DVD cover ZDF
  3. ↑ 11th German Audio Film Prize, TV category, see PDF document ambrosiafilm.de
  4. ↑ See the episode guide for Commissioner van Leeuwen on fernsehserien.de. Retrieved May 24, 2019.
  5. ↑ Payday: Van Leeuwen's third case (2017) in the IMDb, accessed on May 24, 2019.
  6. ^ A b Rainer Tittelbach : TV film "A woman disappears - Van Leeuwen's first case". Geschonneck, Haber, Maranow. A ritual murder & a Swedish thriller from Amsterdam see page tittelbach.tv. Retrieved May 25, 2019.
  7. ↑ A woman disappears. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed May 24, 2019 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  8. ↑ Jens Müller: ZDF crime thriller "A woman disappears" - A brain disappears In: taz.de, October 15, 2012. Accessed on May 24, 2019.
  9. ↑ Carin Pawlak: TV column: "A woman disappears": Sex and too many sedatives In: focus.de, October 16, 2012. Accessed on May 24, 2012.
  10. ↑ A woman disappears see page tvspielfilm.de (including 54 film images). Retrieved May 25, 2019.
  11. ↑ Michael Hanfeld : "A woman disappears" The fear is written on his face. In: FAZ, October 15, 2012. Retrieved on May 25, 2019.
  12. ↑ A woman disappears see page kino.de. Retrieved May 25, 2019.