THE GOLDEN GLOVE/ DER GOLDENE HANDSCHUH
Germany, 2019, 115 minutes, Colour.
Jonas Dassler, Margarete Tiesel.
Directed by Fatih Akin.
While there is a great deal to commend in the technical aspects of this film, performance, photography, editing, direction, it will be for most audiences a horrible experience. The horror is in the basic story. The horror is in the ways in which brutality is visualised.
Fatih Akin has a strong international reputation and has directed many films, often with harsh and violent themes. He has written the screenplay as well as directed this film, based on the story of a brutal killer in Hamburg, 1970-1974, around the time that the director was actually born in that city of Turkish ancestry, 1973. So, he knows the situations well.
The killer in the film, portrayed as a monster, visually ugly, broken teeth, a stoop when standing and in his walking gait, is a tour de force performance by Jonas Dassler. In the prologue, there is graphic sexual behaviour and violence for quite some minutes, the threat of the killer, Fritz Honka, sawing the limbs of his victim after his anger outburst and killing – but finally, the sawing beginning off-screen. However, there are several murders later presented far more explicitly and graphically, an old woman with her head continually bashed on a table in his room, a large prostitute being strangled by him with a scarf, the scene protracted for quite some time.
So, the question is raised about the limits for the “how� in the presentation of such violence. The scenes can be presented, but the discretion and taste of the director is the issue as well as how it affects its audience.
The initial action takes place in 1970, Honka getting rid of the body parts in the rubbish dump, but some of the missing, wrapped and stored in a sealed space in his attic apartment.
1974 focuses on students coming from school, young girl, Petra, being urged to better things by teachers but her complete ignoring of them, impassive. She gets into conversation with a new student, Willie, has a cola with him and he asks if he can take her out. Honka sees her and she becomes a kind of vision for him as well as for his lust. He will imagine her in various circumstances. In fact, Willie does go to the red light area, venturing into The Golden Glove, with its seedy and drunken characters, later bringing Petra but falling foul of a former SS officer who humiliates him in the urinal, urinating on him, Petra trying to find him but his urging her to go home. She is seen by Honka who follows her out of The Golden Glove only to find when he gets into his street that the building is on fire. He has explained to the police that he lives in the attic – and, when the body parts are discovered, he is arrested and confesses.
Another subsidiary character is Honka’s brother, his marriage failed, his drinking, his range of aphorisms which his brother admires.
There are also the habitues of The Golden Glove, the 79-year-old who drinks gin and tonic and comments, various other old men who have all kinds of nicknames, as well as the men at the bar who are used to the clientele, keep the blind shut because people don’t drink in sunlight, and managers everyone well, even when the cleaning lady comes in. Then, there are other prostitutes, especially the older women, gone to seed, alcoholic, drinking all day, ready for a client if they get the offer.
The most significant of these is an old lady who has no money but is given a drink by Honka and taken back to his house, his trying to force himself on her sexually, in a seedy bedroom, with his main room adorned with photos of naked women. He asks about her daughter and makes a contract that she brings her daughter to see him, but the daughter has gone to Vienna, which enrages Honka. However, surprisingly, she cleans the house, tidying everything, stays on to cook for Honka and his brother. She escapes death because the Salvation Army woman officer who visits The Golden Glove, spurned by a lot of the women, denouncing nuns and their education, takes the old woman to a shelter – one moment of grace in the film.
Other women are not so successful, one escaping after Honka forcing himself on her, her companion being bashed to death, and, later, the big woman who is strangled.
The range of actresses portraying these women is quite extensive, most persuasive performances.
A one stage, Honka is knocked down by a car, comes back from hospital prepared to give up all alcohol, even having a night at home, cold turkey. He gets a job as a security guard in a business firm, proud of his uniform, very conscientious (a touch of the German orderliness). He encounters the cleaning lady and later is invited by her to have a party for her birthday with her husband in the building. This has such an effect on Honka that he feels he is in love with her. She has a conversation about her sad life and he violently approaches her, drinking, all his plans undone.
It is in this context, more drinking at The Golden Glove, that he does have the vision of Petra but is thwarted because of the fire.
Ironically, there is the terrible smell in his apartment of the limbs that are hidden away, people often commenting on the stink but his explaining that it is the Greeks downstairs (and an outpost of hatred towards foreigners) and the continued special cooking. On the night of the fire, the Greek family has assembled and is celebrating when, from the roof, maggots start falling on to them and the family gets out of the house, forgetting to turn off the stove which then sets the fire.
Of course, there is much to intrigue in this portrait of the killer – but the audience left to work out his sanity and madness, his violence and sexual preoccupations by observing him in action rather than and psychological explanations offered.
In the opening prologue, audiences may be reminded of Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s 1931 portrait of a serial killer, M. The visuals resemble mad characters in this silent era. When the action is explained as taking place in Hamburg in its seedier aspects, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder come to mind – with Akin offering some kind of homage to Fassbender’s films. And this is confirmed when the audience who know Fassbender’s work see Hark Bohm as the 79-year-old gin and tonic drinker in The Golden Glove.
Featured at the Berlinale of 2019.
(Deborah Young is a respected reviewer. Her review in The Hollywood Reporter is perceptive, articulate and stylishly written, with such observations:
The film detailed without too many scruples or explanations;
A determinedly seamy reconstruction, unremitting bleakness;
Likely to be too much for most viewers to take – unless they are willing to pay for gruesome slumming.)
