The Golden Glove

Jonas Dassler as serial killer Fritz Honka in The Golden Glove

Fatih Akin's The Golden Glove has received mostly opprobrium from stateside critics with the words disgusting, gross, nauseating and depraved being used. It has a metacritic score of 38! Contrarily, I found it to be a moving portrait of down and out humanity in 1970's Hamburg. I've seen many gratuitously violent serial killer films that wallow in depravity, but The Golden Glove is not one of them. The film's look is austere and Akin frames the violence so that the beheadings and amputations are off screen. Most American critics are literal and mistake subject matter for style, not seeing the image within the frame but following the scenario. An exception was John Waters who surely appreciated Akin's evocation of his beloved Fassbinder's milieu.

The Golden Glove is a bar, the site of most of the action per se and where the protagonist, the barely functional Fritz Honka, meets his victims. As in Fassbinder, the bar provides a canvas on which to paint a corrosive portrait of the dregs and marginalized of German society. Grosz and Weegee are also parallels. There is an comic element dark enough to elude most observers, apparently. The author of the novel this film is based on is a satirist named Heinz Strunk and he is probably the source of the black comic dialogue deftly handled by a crack supporting cast. There are ridiculous fantasy sequences of a girl Honka knows posing provocatively in a butcher shop she works in, but most critics reviewed this as if it was a kitchen sink drama.

The other main locale of the film is Honka's room, a lair really, where he dispatches his victims and hides their dismembered remains. The pinups that cover his walls and the many prominent dolls exemplify Honka's misogyny. The Golden Glove touches upon class issues and xenophobia, but they are among many currents running through the film. Akin lets his themes emerge from the material unlike Todd Phillips in Joker who beats the audience across the head with his themes. Indeed, The Golden Glove is a much more complex and rich portrait of a society and its killers than Joker.

Jonas Dassler fully inhabits the role of Fritz Honka. He never broadens or cheapens his characterization even when Honka's behavior is subhuman. Likewise, Akin's directorial attitude is never hysterical or remote no matter how heinous or depraved the action is. His camera placement is objective, but empathic, even when viewing humanity's underside. I regard Akin's Head-On as a masterpiece and remember its followup, The Edge of Heaven, fondly. Still, I haven't seen any of his films during the past decade and The Golden Glove will have me scurrying forth to catch up on his output.