The
ancient Egyptians and many other peoples have written and
painted onto the skins of animals. Tattoo, a German film
directed by Robert Schwentke, features a serial killer
who tries to harvest tattoo art from the skin of humans.
(Nazis, of course, experimented with skin harvesting, but
the film neither makes that linkage nor points out that
animal skin art and tattooing are well recognized genres
in Germany.) The premise of the film is that a contemporary
Japanese tattoo artist in New York has reproduced some
of the classic tattoo art drawings from seventeenth and
eighteenth century Japan. A collector in Germany seeks
to collect as many specimens of magnificent tattoo art,
either by killing those with tattoos or, for a price, by
having a dermatologist cut off the tattooed skin from live
humans. Because of the killings, Berlin homicide Chief
Inspector Minks (played by Christian Redl) is assigned
to the case. Minks is not a friendly cop, so he scares
off partners due to his obsession over the lost of his
spouse in a hit-and-run accident and the later disappearance
of his daughter, Marie (played by Jasmin Schwiers). Talenthunting
from the latest graduates of Berlin's police academy, Minks
decides to recruit Marc Schrader (played by August Diehl),
whose appearance and naughty behavior suggest that he will
be ideal for undercover work at singles bars. Why singles
bars? Not only because Minks has a hunch that tattoo fetishists
abound among the patrons but also because his daughter,
who disappeared two years earlier, may be a regular customer.
The first clue about the identity of the killer appears
when Minks and Schrader go to the apartment of the latest
victim, an American woman who moved from New York to Berlin
about three years earlier. While inspecting the apartment,
there is a knock on the door. The knocker is Maya Kroner
(played by Nadeshda Brennicke), who claims that she knew
the victim in New York but has not seen her for about three
years; otherwise, she divulges nothing. (Later she reveals
much more.) The second clue is a finger in the stomach
of the latest homicide victim; the fingerprint identifies
Günzel (played by Joe Bausch), whom the police track
down. When he runs, Schrader pursues him, ordering him
at gunpoint to freeze. Instead, he walks up to Schrader,
puts his finger in the trigger of the police officer's
gun, and shoots himself. The third clue comes from a man
whom Schrader accidentally spots on the subway with a bleeding
abdomen, where presumably a tattoo was cut from his skin.
Schrader forces the man to divulge that a lawyer arranged
a contract for another party to buy the skin. Indeed, the
lawyer has a collection of skins for which he paid a considerable
sum, but he says that they were all harvested after the
donors signed a contract to do so and thus no law has been
broken. The lawyer says that he has nothing to do with
the killings, though he identifies a chatroom where more
clues might be found. Further on-site investigations continue,
as Minks and Schrader continue to track down the killer,
and the noir film has an ending that some may neither expect
nor understand. Rather than seeking to enable filmviewers
to identify with the personalities of one or more of the
characters, Tattoo is detached so that the gore will not
be excessive and the ending will tie up loose ends that
filmviewers are likely to have missed.
MH
I
want to comment on this film
