“At Close Range”: The suspicious friend – ZEIT ONLINE

Just Gianni Infantino has been elected president of the Football World Association Fifa. The successor to Sepp Blatter is one thing: save the reputation of football. This is a big job. That it still is above board in sports, may believe hardly anyone. The times when you have joined football with the good old football fields, the Miracle of Bern or Roberto Baggio’s tragic faded penalty, are over. In football you think nowadays first to much dirty money.

The fact that this association entirely justified, the ARD movie performs At Close Range admirably in mind. The director Philipp Kadelbach embarks for his film into the center of the world’s networked sports betting mafia. as transactions are from every corner of a dimly lit, smoke-filled pub betting in some side street unwound to Asia, bought players bribed referees.

Large ambitions

in at Close Range is Klaus Roth (Tom Schilling) introduced an undercover in the circle of Serbian Wettmafia. There he gained the trust of Luka Moravac (Edin Hasanovic), the unloved nephew of mob boss Aco Goric (Lazar Ristovski). The turn is one of the masterminds in the world of sports betting business, which is why the senior investigator Frank Dudek him (Jens Albinus) delights to blow up. His undercover Klaus Roth is especially so in great danger because his ambitions are even bigger.

From the inner stature of Roth is actually not suitable to let an undercover fly up the Serb communities. But he has Serbian roots. That is enough: Klaus is now called Milan. Except the admonition “Who eventually can no longer remember his own lies to a dead man,” Dudek is his protégé nothing for the journey to crime darker Berlin side streets.

shards of pain

There flickering screens, there roars the beer, there flows the money, and there close to Dudek’s behest Milan and Luka acquaintance. And when the next job is: “In a week, you and Luka friends!”, They are there already.

Kadelbach has made a television film in the best sense. He tells a story that is not choked by fast cuts and rowdy scenes. “I wanted a deceleration, a resolution camera with the focus, to tell the story from the perspective of Milan,” said Kadelbach. The screenplay by Holger Karsten Schmidt and Oliver Kienle makes this approach to deployment and action character it deserves.

Laid On Ice longings

Luka and Milan are anything but tough guys. They are broken characters, and in this, their brokenness they find each other, to make up from the shards of their pain something new. This is perhaps the real story of this film.

Roth, aka Milan, has long given up internally. He is a baseless, pale and permanently fuming Nachtgestalt which is written in the face their Erwartungslosigkeit; behind one suspects the set on ice longings and desires. Grandiose plays Tom Schilling the undercover investigators: like a tired amoeba, the pistol on the belt is only the backbone.