“Now I have placenta on my Louboutins”
“Kitz” series on Netflix
In the “Kitz” series, Lisi (Sofie Eifertinger) is confronted with a clique of decadent Munich residents in Kitzbühl, above all the Instagram model Vanessa (Valerie Huber). All six episodes of the first season are available on Netflix.
Kitzbühel in Tyrol is considered the Aspen of the Alps, a hotspot for the ski jet set. Netflix is now using “Kitz” as the backdrop for a “Young Adult Mystery Drama”. What that is again is not the smallest puzzle in this series.
EActually, the title of the new, six-part “Young-Adult-Mystery-Drama” (you never stop learning) on Netflix could have been thought of as playful. “Kitz” does not just mean the Tyrolean celebrity ski village Kitzbühel, currently called “Aspen of the Alps” and will soon be the scene of the spectacular again Hahnenkamm race on the notorious Streif.
That can appear as optically vague background noise with its main street and a few valley panorama shoots between the maddened pranks of the rich and beautiful who invaded Munich. And so shares the fate of the Wilde Kaiser village not far away Elmau in the “Bergdoktor”.
Of course, the short title also plays with the Kiez as a district where you can be among yourself. And with the kids here – as young adults – provide the not very seductively dazzling main staff.
A rogue, too, if you don’t think ahead to the Kitzloch, that now infamous, boisterous après-ski amusement and bottling pin right next to the cable car valley station in Ischgl, where in January 2020 the corona viruses hit their loops and triple Rittberger infected from Tyrol from half of Europe.
But not even the streaming services tick that quickly and with such ironic tidiness. Therefore, even though it was filmed in the middle of the pandemic, there is no mask, no allusion to Covid.
And during the first Netflix project in Austria „Freud“ In March 2020, with ORF support, a horde of major actors rolled through a bloody-grotesque Vienna as a psychoanalytic horror ghost train, tastes good „Kitz“ unfortunately completely neutral like canned soup. The adolescent problems of affluent teenagers are only taken very superficially seriously.
Doré Youth at Après-Ski: Scene from “Kitz”
Source: Walter Wehner / Netflix
The various posh alpine huts with wellness areas the size of tennis courts are not really glamorous either. Although the coke hills in the designer living room are sometimes higher than the sparingly sprayed artificial snow in the chalet garden.
But just as the open fire only glows coldly like a video screen, this Alpensociety saga, directed from Germany, lacks the soul and, above all, the over-the-top loving kissing joke that made “Kir Royal” so immortal. The showrunner’s Nikolaus Schulz-Dornburg (“Biohackers”, “4 Blocks”) co-designed series seems totally gentrified, although for Netflix it wants to be the red-white-red local window for the rest of the world.
But while in series from Scotland or Spain, Mexico or Texas people speak authentically, it starts here with a strangely placeless High German of the completely frozen soul that has already spoiled “Sisi”. There are Austrian and Tyrolean dialect cracks (Tobias Moretti and his brother Gregor Bloéb for example) that would have fit in wonderfully. After all, Florence Kasumba, Nadeshda Brennicke, Andreas Pietschmann and Tyron Ricketts are there as adults in the supporting roles.
Otherwise, the cocktail of intrigue whisked into eye candy works – does the noble influencer Vanessa (Valerie Huber) have the brother of the ski rental daughter Lisi (Sofie Eifertinger), who is now biblically contemplating blood revenge, on her conscience or not? – plentifully flat and transparent.
Such gaps are routinely sprinkled with a little diversity in the form of Vanessa’s black friend Dominik (Burgtheater actor Bless Amanda also delivers a lot of eye candy with all his muscles in the right place) and a casual gay love story between the one that has long since been outed Farmer’s son Hans (Ben Felipe) and the drugged hotel heir Kosh (Zoran Pingel). Its five-star hostel is of course located in realiter on the Berchtesgadener Obersalzberg.
Simple skier philosophy
After all, given the rural reality shock of a fall calf birth in a stinking stable, Kosh is allowed to use one of the few nice punch lines: “Now I have placenta on my Louboutins!” Otherwise you have to stick to simple skier philosophies like: “If you don’t you only start at the top, you won’t arrive at the bottom either. ”
And the interesting, absolutely realistic conflict between the tourist sell-off of the homeland, which is fueled by Tyrolean greed, and the winners on Bonzenhügel, is not really addressed in the first place.
Substitute Aspen is pretty much burned down in “Kitz”, if only because the game with fire is taken literally. But the big “Deitschen” foaming, as it bubbles viciously in so many Austrian media, is now also not in fashion. “Kitz” is decent TV entertainment that ducks away fluid and well oiled. Although it doesn’t really have the world champion slope swing.
The shiny look is even undermined by a few real pimples on the faces of the leading actors, without, of course, even touching the delicacy of the Swedish coming-of-age Netflix series “Young Royals”. But for a sleek Instagram update of “Yodelling in the Lederhose” including Schnösel ski bunnies while having a champagne shower in the spa, it is definitely enough.
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