Everyone needs a purpose in life. For example, a mass brawl with strangers. So that no one gets too seriously injured, but first a nice round of warm-up. About today's hooligans.
If you're looking forward to finally getting your face in your face again on Saturday, you're either a masochist after a full week's work - or a hooligan. Yes, they still exist, even if the wild street battles with each other and with the police are now the exception, at least in Germany. The new Saarbrücken "crime scene" wants to show where and how people fight in the name of football these days.
That doesn't make "The Cold of the Earth" that bad: it doesn't just show a dead hooligan, but above all a lot of football-loving people from a wide variety of backgrounds. "When I'm in the stadium, I'm free," says Commissioner Baumann, for example, who turns out to be a Saarbrücken Ultra. The "crime scene" anticipates one of the biggest points of criticism from fans of media coverage of football: the mixing of hooligans and ultras.
The difference is enormous: Ultras are the umbrella term for self-organized fan groups, whose numbers are in the tens of thousands. From left to right and from non-violent to violent, everything is there, it depends very much on the respective club and group. What they all have in common, however, is that ultras see themselves as core fans of the supported team, while hooligans, to put it simply, mainly want to hit them.
And they mostly do that in so-called "field matches" - as shown in the film - with clear rules and an organizational devotion that often borders on the absurd, if you consider the purpose of the matches. Opposing groups are sometimes picked up if they can't find the venue. Or it is counted and sorted out if one group is significantly larger than the other. Either way, no weapons are allowed, downed opponents must be left alone. And before the matches, we warm up for a good half an hour and the place of the fight is also searched for sharp stones and the like, so that nobody gets injured too badly.
The reasons for the bloody leisure activity are certainly individually very different. However, the thread that "The Cold of Earth" follows is plausible: the murderess and her versatile colleague with the Kylie Minogue penchant work night shifts in the same factory. In general, the hooligans shown are staged with a rather depressing life background, only on weekends do they come alive as part of the group. The message: At the end of the day, it's also about giving your own life meaning, even if the outsider doesn't understand it.
You can think what you want of that, after all, the public hardly notices anything about the circus anymore. Usually anyway, because of course there are always incidents with the police or bystanders, often when they are drunk or after heavy consumption. With all the quirky conservativeness that characterizes today's hools, it quickly becomes clear that this is not a harmless hobby and that violence simply cannot be controlled one hundred percent.
