Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stasi, the secret service of the GDR, sent a young woman to West Berlin to get rid of someone there. While Kleo Straub first decorates her victim in a hip disco and then expertly kills her in the toilets, two dorky Stasi men are waiting for her on the other side of the border in their GDR car. “Where is she anyway? She won’t screw up, will she?” one grumbles. “The Wall will fall before it messes up,” assures the other, confident in both Kleo’s qualities and the durability of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. This sets the light tone of the German Netflix series Kleoa fast-paced spy thriller full of jokes.
Quentin Tarantino is never far away, not only because of the cartoonish violence, but also because of the absurd turns and the important role of design and music from the time in which the story plays (including the East German rock band the Puhdys).
Kleo is the granddaughter of a high-ranking Stasi officer and she firmly believes in the communist state in which she was raised. Until she is suddenly imprisoned and severely beaten. Why? When the Wall has fallen and she’s released, she’s going to find out, armed with curiosity, vengeance and the necessary weaponry.
Weak men, strong women
For someone who kills so easily, Kleo is a remarkably endearing woman. She is fearless and cold-blooded as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, headstrong as Pippi Longstocking and boisterous as Nina Hagen. And with her round face, laconic glance and old-fashioned bangs, she is irresistibly reminiscent of the young Angela Merkel.
At unexpected moments, this mission-obsessed Kleo is also mild, girlishly cheerful, and even forgiving. She is played beautifully Jella Haase, known in Germany for the blockbuster Fack ju Gohtea (2013).
The men in the series are all weak, naive or self-overestimating and at best pathetic bumblers. The women are cool, steely, cunning and high-flyers in the spy business, from the villainous head of the West German secret service to the wife of ex-GDR leader Honecker (‘Aunt Margot’) living in Chilean exile. Another dangerous co-star of Kleo, even heavily pregnant, with her eyes shining with murder, enjoys a wild chase down a road along a ravine.
No cliché remains unexplored in the series, whether it concerns standard scenes from action or espionage films, or the image of the GDR, the Stasi and the hip, techno-obsessed Berlin of the early 1990s. But it happens with so much Schwung and fat exaggeration that it becomes one big parody.
This is the kind of series where the experience, sometimes thrilling sometimes hilarious ride, is more important than the story. But for those who want to see it, it is also about Kleo’s disappointment in the GDR, her family and humanity in general. After eight episodes, just enough opponents barely survived to hope for a second season.