Diego Aparicio reviews Faith Akin’s controversial and violent thriller. 

Following The Golden Glove world premiere in Berlin, I’ve seen a few critics comparing director Fatih Akin’s latest to Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built due to the films’ common theme of violence against women. I am not a critic, and I have no agenda, so I’ll say honestly (and in my humble opinion) that this comparison is very superficial and suggests a lazy viewer. The similarity ends with the gore and misogyny portrayed on screen: while von Trier’s ‘construction’ oozed of egocentric and self-indulgent intentions, as if to explain himself and his oeuvre, Fatih Akin’s work seems, to me, at least a bit more nuanced.

A big reason why I appreciated The Golden Glove a great deal is the presence of what I interpret as literary metaphors, presumably stemming from Heinz Strunk’s 2016 eponymous novel. The time at which the novel was written makes me all the more eager to conclude that the film has a lot more to say about our times than what its 1970s setting might suggest. I am not a fan of violence, on-screen or otherwise, and, sadly, von Trier’s latest effort failed to convince me. But recently I’ve seen violence used as a means to a cinematic end – and not just for its shock value – much more effectively than I ever thought possible. The first time was in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale; the second in The Golden Glove.

Throughout Akin’s film, we follow serial killer Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler) in 1970s Hamburg. Most of the time, Honka keeps busy by overworking his liver at The Golden Glove – a pub where ex-S.S. soldiers, ex-concentration camp prostitutes, and other similarly unhappy people drink their lives away. Otherwise, Herr Honka spends his time picking up deranged, drunken homeless women at the Glove, raping them, and chopping them up into pieces to keep in his attic. Whenever the next victim asks where the stench is coming from, Herr Honka’s reply is always the same: it’s the Greek family’s fault, the one living in the flat below, always adding that disgusting garlic into everything they cook.

‘Gruesome’ doesn’t even begin to describe the horrors to which the viewer is subjected. (If we could describe everything with words, we wouldn’t need films in the first place). People walked out of the auditorium, brought their hands to their mouths and eyes, and turned their gazes away from the screen in disgust more than a few times during the screening I attended. But on behalf of those who didn’t walk out, I would like to argue that The Golden Glove is really not as pointless as some are calling it. Far from glorifying violence through the portrayal of his troubled – to put it mildly – protagonist, Akin gives us a taste of a reality unpalatable to humanity through the years: that the rottenness we so hatefully perceive around us, is very often an internalised hatred that we dare not admit.

One should not overlook the fact that this story’s characters are all victims of war:  a woman forced into prostitution during WWII; an ex-Nazi official with no purpose in life 30 years later; and Honka, whose father was arrested for being a Communist in Nazi Germany. In an early scene, we are introduced to the theory that there are three reasons for people to drink:  to celebrate the good things, to drink away the bad things, and to escape the boredom of nothing happening at all. Celebration seems to be the least likely reason for these characters’ severe alcohol dependence. These are people whose lives were forever dismantled by violence in all its unimaginable and horrific forms. It is a violence that is very much passed on and inherited, still pervasive in the lives of younger generations. No matter how we try to conceal the hateful acts of violence from the past, they inevitably slip through the cracks of the rotting attics of history, like maggots feeding off dead bodies.

Much like the characters in The Golden Glove, our own generation’s passive acceptance of violence and the inability to connect may have been inherited through postwar trauma in more ways than we realise. The fact that Fritz and Willi (Tristan Göbel) share a similar taste in eyewear and teenage girls implies a few reasons why the Honkas of the world have not yet ceased to exist. Akin does not force feed his audience this reading of the story, but there are hints supporting this reading inconspicuously scattered throughout the film:  WWII references occur more than a few times, and war becomes the common thread connecting all characters.

In The Golden Glove, men and women alike have to live with all the trauma that the war has brought upon them in a strongly divided Cold War era Germany. Honka and his brother seem to believe that women are objects made for their satisfaction. This unhealthy relationship between the sexes is perpetuated by apathy in a society whose wounds can only be numbed by alcohol.

The only glimpse of humanity we see in Honka is when he decides to stop drinking – which is also when he develops what appear to be feelings for a coworker. “I had dreamed that I’d do more in life than just clean offices,” she opens up to him. This is a cleaner who’s wasting her life away with an unemployed husband who spends her earnings on alcohol. Sympathetic as he may appear, Honka’s only verbal attempt to express feelings towards her comes when he’s once again drunk. “I love you. Now I want to fuck you,” he exclaims before violently assaulting her.

There is much power in Akin’s subtle insertions of the peaceful Greek family scenes amongst all the massacres and acts of inhumanity committed by the film’s antihero. Through this lens, see a family of refugees accused of creating the foul stench in Honka’s apartment, a situation which is likely to be a commentary on today’s increasing nationalism in various states globally. When read this way, the film appears not only to be opposed to war and toxic masculinity, but also to right-wing extremism.

The film doesn’t justify itself in any obvious way, but comparing The Golden Glove to The House that Jack Built seems unfair to say the least. Akin’s depiction of Honka’s monstrosity is ultimately unsettling for a much more profound reason: the real horror is that, in contrast to von Trier’s, this misogynist serial killer actually existed. Fritz Honka was alive in the 1970s, a product of one of the most horrific periods in recent history.

Overall, The Golden Glove was not a strong contender for the Golden Bear Award at this year’s Berlinale. Jonas Dassler’s extraordinary physical performance and Rainer Kalusmann’s commendably greasy cinematography were not enough for the jury. Still, I thought there was a case to be made in the film’s favour. Akin succeeds multiple times in drawing laughs only moments after showing a murder, and that says something very interesting about our attitude towards violence.

The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh) premiered at Berlin Film Festival on February 9th. It has yet to acquire a UK release date. Check out a clip below: 

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s upcoming drama. 

“Von Donnersmarck: two features, never more.”

For a while this was one of the great tragedies of modern German cinema, the acclaimed director of The Lives of Others dropping off the cinematic map after completion of his poorly-received (though relatively successful) sophomore effort. Eight years later he returns with a grand and sweeping narrative about art, love, and Nazis. With an estimated $20 million budget, it is also amongst Germany’s most expensive productions, and that much is clear.

In approaching this three-hour behemoth, however, I detect an uneven split. There is the more substantial film, one that concerns the process of artistic creation, its meanings and origins, set around an artist living in East and West Germany during the Cold War. Then is another, a melodrama about love and eugenics in the GDR, an exaggerated and far less engaging subplot that consumes most of the film’s first half. It is in this melodrama that many of the film’s issues come to the fore, the first and most essential being its appearance. While the cinematography is technically well executed, it is the production design that must be questioned. Everything has a sheen, a brightness and cleanliness. It almost reflects the romantic cinema of the thirties and forties, obsessed with beautifying everything and everyone. Kurt (Tom Schilling) might paint all day and night in one scene, but God forbid his perfect hair might fall out of place, or his fresh face be besmirched by some blemish. And Ellie (Paula Beer) may age more than a decade by the film’s close, but let that not show on her faultless body, always caught in a warm and welcoming light. For a film so caught up with the concept of truth, it seems perhaps ironic that it presents a visual aesthetic so unreal.

This unreality follows into this subplot’s villain, too. Professor Seeband (Sebastian Koch), an ex-Nazi eugenicist, becomes the arch-evil, the father-in-law from hell. Not only is he a Nazi (the skull on his cap emphasised like in that Mitchell and Webb skit), but he’s a philanderer, prickly in attitude, and a general bastard all round. His character cannot be compelling because he is entirely contrived, and nothing about him is at all refined or rounded. It is possible for a Nazi to be human even if they are still despicable –  this kind of moral depth might have given the film something to grasp on in this extended section. Instead we are left with a ruefully predictable romance, one whose dramatic ironies veer increasingly in the direction of soap opera. It is competently, if not excellently made and always watchable. But at once, disappointing.

While the sections focused on art must still endure the rather ironic aesthetic qualities of the film, they are a little more developed in narrative, and for the better. The central idea is an artist finding his voice, caught between extremes. The first of these is in the Soviet clench of East Germany, where limitations are obvious. He is trapped in the genre of social realism, which prioritizes immediate and obvious meaning to the more indulgent habits of artists. This is art for the people, a populism of sorts, one that sees bourgeois in the abstract. Von Donnersmarck is clear to reflect this belief against Nazi rejection of degenerate art, for much the same reasoning.

Kurt then emigrates to West Germany, but here faces a foe less obvious than Soviet artistic tastes, that being a lack of substance altogether. Instead, it is necessary to produce something garish and loud, new and outspoken. A total freeform in which it is easy to lose oneself, as Kurt almost does. He must discover his own style, and what it means to have a style at all. This arc functions, but it functions as any might predict. Again, for all its artistic pretentions in content, the film’s form is deeply conventional, and perhaps loses a sense of its subject in being so. At Eternity’s Gate, while perhaps not so pristinely crafted as Never Look Away, achieves its own goal of explicating the artistic process far better in its attempt to embody it. We see as Van Gogh sees, and understand the world as he does fully. While von Donnersmarck occasionally experiments with point of view shots, this is largely a film from the objective eye. Everything is as it seems.

I am left at a crossroads with Never Look Away. It is generally engaging and always well crafted, but at once lacking in direct, evocative feeling. It hits every beat, but as the (surprisingly smooth) run-length trundles on, emotional investment always seems out of reach. The acting is generally up to standard, at least half of the music is great (with the other half being uncharacteristically bland for Max Richter), and it’s difficult to fault von Donnersmarck’s understanding of space or camera placement. But the result is spectacle that fails to move.

5/10

Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor) had its premiere at Venice Film Festival. It has yet to acquire a UK release date. Check out its German trailer below: