In neo-noir Babylon Berlin, the heroes are never black and white

Babylon Berlin ★★★½
Tuesday (September 10), SBS, 11.30pm

The term “film noir” was coined after World War II by French film critics expressing admiration for the dark, morally ambiguous movies being cranked out by Hollywood at the time. These movies, bearing the signature black-and-white visual style influenced by German Expressionism that inspired the label, were full of ominous shadows, both literally and figuratively. Noirs came to be defined as stylish-but-bleak tales packed with hardboiled detectives, menacing mobsters, mysterious femmes fatales and all kinds of other compromised characters swimming in the moral muck of humanity’s underbelly. In noir, the bad guys were really bad, and the good guys … well, they weren’t always so good.

Volker Bruch in Babylon Berlin.Credit: SBS

Since the classic noir era, generations of filmmakers have strived with varying degrees of success to emulate the striking style and tone of the films that so impressed the post-war French cinephiles. Babylon Berlin is such an attempt by distinguished German creator Tom Tykwer. On Tykwer’s CV are such notable productions as Run Lola Run, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and Sense8. Tykwer knows genre, and he knows how to generate atmosphere, which is what he does in spades with BB.

This is the premiere of season two on SBS (four seasons have been made in total), and so perhaps a little refresher is in order. Babylon Berlin lays its scene in the titular city in 1929, as Germany’s Weimar Republic sputters towards its doom. A country struggling to recover from one world war, and as yet unaware that it is marching towards a catastrophic second one, is beset with crime and decay, and Berlin is the epicentre of this decadent slow-motion collapse.

In the first season, Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), transferred to Berlin from Cologne, was dragged into a labyrinth of violence and corruption, taking in political scandal, gangland murder, intrigue imported from Soviet Russia, and the increasing tensions between different factions of German society – communists, Nazis and royalists, all seeking to exploit the nation’s decline to facilitate their own rise. At the end of season one, Rath scored himself a minor victory in the case at hand, but things were far from settled and the web was even more tangled than ever.

As we open season two, Rath is put on the case of 15 dead bodies found in a mass grave, the victims all members of the Red Fortress, a group seeking to overthrow Stalin in the USSR. He continues to work with Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), the clerk/prostitute who assisted him in season one and whose pursuit of her dream of becoming Berlin’s first female homicide detective does not always suit Rath’s somewhat antisocial nature. Also on the scene is Helga, the widow of Rath’s brother – and his long-time secret lover – and her son, whose arrival is greeted joyfully by the inspector, despite the obvious complications that are about to ensue.

With corpses piling up, political heat on his back and a rail wagon full of Russian gold floating about in the mix, Rath’s job could not be any tougher unless he were a morphine addict with PTSD who has to hide himself away on occasion to prevent anyone seeing the debilitating tremors that take over his body. As luck would have it, he happens to be that.

Babylon Berlin is neither a cheerful saga nor an action-packed one. Brutal, horrific deeds are done but often off-screen, allowing us to see the aftermath, and in the way of European series it proceeds at a languid pace, drenching us in the period milieu and giving the setting and characters space to breathe. The complex intertwining narratives therefore unfold slowly, which may be a strength or a weakness depending on how much you’re jonesing for thrills.

As a neo-noir, the series lacks the stylised presentation of your average Bogart fave, but nevertheless immerses us in a world of shadows. The moral murkiness of mid-war Berlin – a society bruised and beaten down, where many scrabble to survive however they can, but also with something truly dreadful looming on the horizon – is depicted with meticulous attention to detail. Like any good noir, Babylon Berlin makes it clear that this is a dirty, dirty world, and if anything good is to come of it, even the best of us may have to get a little dirty ourselves.

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