Review ‘Babylon Berlin’: Dancing while the world starts to burn
The balls stay in the air with the mesmerizing rhythm of one of the cabaret acts in the show’s fictional nightclub, Moka Efti; the effect can be, to use the favorite description among “Babylon Berlin” fans, addictive. The series — and especially the fourth season, which features a storyline about the coming together of Berlin’s criminal gangs — has been compared to “M,” the great 1931 thriller from German director Fritz Lang. But a better comparison would be to long-silent films like “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler” and “Spies,” intricately constructed thrillers that are among the most luxurious forms of entertainment ever put to film.
It helps, of course, that the place and time in which the show is set is Weimar Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, a ready-made backdrop for artistic, cultural and sexual ferment in a city hurtling toward political and social catastrophe. The action hopscotches from police laboratories to Expressionist film sound stages, from munitions factories to beer halls, from stately country houses to squalid tenements, with a studious dedication to the quality and evocativeness of costumes, sets and locations.
Season 4 jumps forward to New Year’s Eve in 1930, just over a year after Season 3 ended amid the chaos of the stock market crash. Newsreel footage of bread lines and of angry crowds of unemployed people is used as a counterpoint to scenes in which the show’s characters participate in the celebrations at the start of 1931.
In a season-long motif, Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), the former prostitute who has found her way into the police killing squad, dances happily down the street to an upbeat new song, “A Day Like Gold” (actually sung by the contemporary German jazz singer Max Raabe). Later, she will compete in a dance marathon and will end the season by stepping out again to “A Day Like Gold” and shouting, “Tomorrow is tomorrow, and now is now, and now I want to dance.” The obvious metaphor is softened by our knowledge of how completely the world is about to burn.
The new season is typically packed with storylines. On the crime drama side, the murder of a government official leads to an investigation into the city’s ringvereine, criminal gangs with connections to boxing clubs. On the social history side, Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), the police detective and former heroin addict who is Ritter’s on-again, off-again love, becomes entangled with the SA, the brownshirt-wearing Nazi paramilitary.
