A young and inexperienced cop in Berlin sheds his innocence when he is drawn into a series of bloody murders commissioned by a mysterious tattoo fetishist. While a rather untypical product of mainstream European cinema, this first major effort by director Robert Schwentke is nonetheless a good indicator of where young German filmmakers are heading to. It would seem that most of the local filmschool hipsters have been molded by the same standard principles in story and production design that make for occasional good but, alas, also a majority of awful Hollywood flicks. This propensity may be best observed in the seminal TV crime series Tatort (Scene of the Crime), where aspiring cinematographers get a chance to work hands on Schwentke, for his part, directed three episodes. Though the "cinematic" feel and level of "professionality" of these 90-minute small screen pictures have certainly gone up in the past ten or so years, you have to be alarmed at how interchangeable and, arguably, dull they have become. Tattoo is an ambitious Tatort. It is in a way very mature scarily so. It's all neatly timed, the story and plot are textbook, the locations well-casted (most likely the only film set in Berlin that does without the usual tourist vistas), the travellings elaborate, the picture is crafty, the soundtrack heavily suggestive etc. But, as the French say, the mayonnaise doesn't blend. In fact, the director's intentions (making a gritty Euro urban thriller) are as subtle as ripping someone's skin off to get his tattoo. (By the way, the idea is by no means new the 1968 French comedy Le Tatoué with Jean Gabin and Louis de Funès treated this subject in a far more refined way.) Unlike his famous US predecessors, Tattoo never hits the right tone and, worst of all, lacks genuinely creepy moments and an overall tension. "They say a person's house is a mirror to his soul..." See, that's the sort of dialogue, along with some fluffy art talk about 17th-century Japanese tattoo masters, that'll strangle any movie to a pathological death. This general impression extends to the actors who desperately try to come to terms with their storyboard characters. Germany's shooting star August Diehl as an unlikely specimen of a new generation of techno-dancing big city cops delivers a wholly unconvincing performance. Christian Redl is your cynical old school detective with a chip on his shoulder, and lacks depth. Nadeshda Brennicke does her best to play a Kraut version of the femme fatale, which is obviously far from enough. (Well, she is half redeemed once she's dropped her skirt.) And while all this is still more or less acceptable for a late Saturday night telly flick, the end clearly isn't. What happened there? Where was the teacher to get Schwentke to revise his homework? But apart from that glitch, let there be no doubt that this German model pupil is off for a great Hollywood career shooting commissioned box office busters by the dozen. Good riddance, if you ask me.
Review of Tattoo
