| 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 |