New German crime fiction

By Tracy

I am three-quarters of the way through reading a new German crime title, Schreie im Nebel (lit. Screams or Cries in the Fog), by Tina Schlegel. It's her first crime novel, and is tagged as a "Bodensee Krimi" -- the Bodensee being what we call Lake Constance in English, and the novel's setting.

Apparently regional crime novels (Regionalkrimi or simply Regiokrimi) are big in Germany -- I happened on this one because it was newly out and available in my nearest bookshop. The Bodensee is in this region, so I thought it could be interesting.

Imagine my surprise on discovering that the main character, the detective Paul Sito, was a vegan.

I don't think I have ever come across a vegan protagonist in a novel before.

Not being a fan of novels about serial killing, especially when they're gory, I am nonetheless intrigued to see the way in which Schlegel has brought discourses about animal rights, violence and crime together in this story.

There's also the question of the way place is affected by the underlying (sometimes not so underlying) twentieth-century history of specific violence. Some aspects of this, though not with reference to Schlegel's book because it's just new, are addressed in the book of essays, Tatort Germany: The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction, edited by Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog.

Browsing through it, I discovered that Germany has a police-procedural crime fiction series that's been running since 1970 -- also called Tatort (which means "crime scene"). And I thought The Bill was long-running! The Bill, however, was largely focussed on one place, with only occasional forays elsewhere (as far as I ever saw) -- whereas the German series relies on regional difference in each story.

Mother and daughter movie

By Tracy

I don't usually get to watch films on broadcast t.v. (not enough time, too much else to do!) but last night, having sat down to watch the first episode of Chris Lilley's long-awaited new series Angry Boys (mixed feelings,  but it's only the first, so we'll have to wait and see) -- well, I got caught, because a French film came on straight after, and I stayed up too late.

The film -- Carine Tardieu's La Tête de Maman (In Mum's Head) (2007) was mixed, too: I'm not a fan of the quirky, mildly pretentious bits that French film-makers seem to feel obliged to put in as perhaps some sort of nod to their often-experimental and non-realist history -- one more sequence that might-be-happening-but-isn't, one more irruption of a fantasy-character into an otherwise smoothly plausible plot, and I switch off.

However, certain aspects were quite compelling. The teenage daughter of the film, Lulu, is a tomboy on the cusp of maturity but stuck there partly because of the grinding pressure of her mother's (Juliette's, or Juju's) permanent depression and fixation on apparently psychosomatic illness.

Lulu accidentally discovers a photo and then a home movie in which she glimpses her now-staid mother's pre-marital life, twenty years before. Juliette back then was vivacious, happy, freewheeling and open to experiment of all sorts, madly in love with Jacques... not the man she married.

The rest of the film is about what happens when Lulu digs around in that past and tries to "improve" things for her mother. Despite the sometimes-twee gestures the film makes, the central story -- how naive youth works on assumptions about its parents -- kept me watching, and was handled with appropriate ironic distance on the daughter's actions as well as compassion for her own process of growth and lesson-learning.

(I could have done without the cameo from Jane Birkin, whom I find somehow irritating. Lulu is an obsessive Birkin fan and the singer-actress appears as herself in fantasy mode, as a kind of substitute mother-figure to Lulu, materialising and vanishing after their short dialogues.)

It's fairly well-acted in the parts that count (mother and daughter -- the rest are foils, even the waspish grandmother) and kept me watching till the end, in spite of myself...

(NB On the web this movie is often named with U.S. spelling, In Mom's Head.)