The Golden Glove

One must wonder what director Fatih Akin was thinking in bringing to life the story of German serial killer Fritz Honka, famous for several murders of prostitutes in the early 1970's. Akin's previous film "In the Fade" was a powerful dramatic effort that seemed a lot more of a real story than this insanely bizarre film. If the idea behind "The Golden Glove" was to conceive the most disgusting and unappealing film ever made, to depict the art of grotesque and how crazed some people and some lives are, then he made a glorious film. But I'm not condemning the film; in fact, I've find it very good though explicitly graphic and twisted as I haven't seen in ages. The director has some good cards to make his game and the trick works because he's anchored with great subtle technique that makes the experience interesting and the excellent performance of Jonas Dassler, a brave young man who undress himself from vanity and fear to create one of the most frightening, sickening, ugliest characters to ever live. The make-up department did an outstanding job in turning the handsome Dassler into the bizarre-looking Honka; the rest is up to Dassler to imitate his speech pattern due to a speech impediment the real Honka had. Here's a chamaleonic star we will be seeing a lot in more films.

It seemed at the beginning of this review I'd be detracting the movie but nope. Warning for possible future viewers: this isn't a nice experience (it's not supposed to, anyway) but it's definitely one of those films where you'll be walking out in disgust, or criticizing it harshly without looking objectively or just pointing that it's a pointless film. The very first scene is a clear indicative of that with a long shot, no cuts, of Honka killing his first victim. Sickening! To me, like similarly themed one such as "Angst" or "Henry: Portrait of a Killer" it's a way to have a deep look inside criminal minds, their acts and behaviors, and on an ultimate case, to see what the media doesn't show to you. There's a strange sense of curiosity as well in seeing how film directors approach brutal subjects: if they're just making psycho-analytical films with a sense of making the audience think or if it's just gory exploitation that doesn't develop to anything. "The Golden Glove" almost falls into the second trap but Mr. Akin gives us little moments in between gruesome murders to explore the personality of Honka, his pathetic miserable life which seems to present a "reasoning" behind his murders - another case of a man with a turbulent childhood and psychological problems came along. It's a sheer reality, it doesn't go easy nor should be.

However, the bumps along the way makes also makes the film strange to see it. The bar from the title is there to put some relief on audiences, a place where Honka is a regular meeting another sort of odd characters, heavy drinkers as he is but inside there it's all about awkward/dark comic situations - and the film is full of that. Nervous laughters for some; distractive for others. To me, it was a plot point to connect beginning and ending; just like the pretty blonde girl Honka fantasizes about from time to time while he's having his strange sexual encounters with old, fat prostitutes, later his victims. Outside of the fantasy inside his head, the girl appears three times; other than that, it's all a perverted wet-dream of a sick man. A little question of absurd: he's a bad Quasimodo of all sorts but since he's the one who favors paying for sex why is he always chasing old hookers? Demanding sex-workers back then, but really, we don't have such a scene to explore more of Honka's failures as a man and we're barely told that he was married twice. And as for accuracies, the film jumps facts and events or place them in the wrong period (1970-1974 was the years of Fritz crimes but we get the impression one or two years has passed).

And we get back to wondering about the real aim of the picture. It'll possibly looked as just another nasty story made by an insane mind; or that quality over substance again is overshadowed (at times it feels that - the long takes, camera angles and movements, the real feeling of being part of 1970's Germany but there isn't enough material to make us stunned. If we look the film as a the tragic horror story with real people, the aim of making audiences terrified, nervous, nauseated, Mr. Akin delivers a spetacle of which I cannot feel unimpressed with mixed thoughts about how such individual as Honka could ever exist. The power of imagination must never be lost, and by that I mean that it's not just going back in time to get a true feeling of things that the film works, but many times I kept imagining the scents and the stench of Honka's tiny apartment, always unclean, smelly due to the corpses left. Akin puts those settings - there and the bar - where you are in awe with everything, it's like 90% of excrutiating moments for the remaining 10% of curiosity is what makes some of us keep going to see what's gonna happen next. I can't think of current director who can do that with a material such as this. Or anything else, really.

If anything of the tiny bits of qualities exposed here as why the picture works or if it's interesting don't convince you, at least you cannot deny that Dassler's creepy, violent and twisted performance is one in a lifetime. He is transformed not just physically but there are insightful moments where you can enter his mind, the inner abysm of Honka or at least the ideal the director makes of him. The sequence where he befriends a pretty woman on his job as a night guard is one of those surprising moments when he's all awkward near her, quite polite at the same time finding ways to be around her but it's played for a long time as a contrast to the brutality he treats the older women (one of them becomes his maid, practically, of whom he's very abusive). The subtle and little moments of change of him is what made me going. To see what comes next... 8/10