Fatih Akin, a descendant of Turkey who immigrated to Germany, committed "evil" assault this year and sent the overweight crime film "Golden Gloves" .
The film background on Germany in the 1970s, tells the story of a man named Fritz Honka psychopathic criminals red-light district in Hamburg, Germany, he murdered four women successive acts of terror. The film uses the bar where he chooses the "prey", "Golden Gloves" as the title.
In 2017, Fatih Akin , who has an immigrant background, directed "Out of Nowhere" starring Diane Kruger. Through the perspective of a mother, it tells the contemporary Germans’ quest for Germany under neo-Nazism. The story of fairness and justice.
The film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, was nominated for the Palme d’Or, and helped the heroine Diane Kruger win the Cannes queen crown. Two years later, Fatih Akin's "Golden Gloves" was almost as big as last year's overweight work , Lars von Trier's "This House Is Made By Me".
If "This House Is Made By Me" is the pinnacle of spiritual aesthetics, then "Golden Gloves" is a boring hammer of realism!
First of all, the film story is not fictional, but based on real events; in addition, through the extremely stylized image construction, the screen vividly "reproduces" the horror scenes of the time in the way of a stage room drama.
Fatih Akin rarely dissolves the drama and sense of space in "Golden Gloves", and strives to make the mimicry film narrative and the real past continue to overlap.
The emphasis on authenticity is clearly expressed by his scene scheduling, lens language and space design. The beginning of the film is a shocking killing scene. Without explaining the cause, it directly shows the brutal act of Honka's first crime. There is a mutual tribute between this scene and "This House Is Made By Me". Honka also showed the panic and bewilderment of the serial murderer Jack during the first assault, the mental breakdown in the middle, and the extreme indifference at the end. .
Fatih Akin used the simplest "mechanical" lens scheduling when performing this highly visually impactful content . There are no obvious editing traces. In a closed and narrow indoor space, with a long "solidification" lens, the audience is forced to witness this physiologically uncomfortable thrilling scene.
The lens firmly practiced André Bazin's image ontology law and realized the expression technique of "the image is the same as the subject", making the film a window open to the world. Through this window, the audience got a glimpse of the “real” scene of the unknown crime scene. Fatih Akin’s intentions are very obvious. At the beginning, the audience is disgusted and uncomfortable, and the audience is gradually "desensitized" to violence and bloody scenes , so that through violence, they can explore the darkness of human nature and the depressing human nature. Historical environment.
Fatih Akin in the film is always limited to a montage of hair play, those bloody scenes of horror, a mixture of reality and fictional narrative content, has a real density of space on the screen.
Don't beautify, just seek truth. Most of the time in the film, the camera only moves in a small range, so that the subjective line of sight of the audience and the male protagonist Hongka is the same. The subtle movement of the camera is only used to show how Honka’s spiritual world reflects the conditions of the external environment. The long-term high degree of overlap has caused the audience and the criminals' psychology to have a wonderful projection effect. The audience follows the camera and follows Hongka's sight shift, focusing on the new "prey".
"Golden Gloves" has a lot of indoor scenes , one is the small attic where Honka lives, where he kills and hides the corpse; the other is the place where he contacts the outside world and searches for prey-the golden glove bar; and the other is after the film Halfway through, his new workplace, closed office and rest room.
In the indoor scheduling, Fatih Akin borrowed from the German director Fassbinder 's "Fear Eats Soul". For example, in the indoor bar, the diagonal composition is the main theme, and the multi-angle front and back is used to create a sense of alienation between characters and a sense of visual oppression of important characters.
In the attic and on the stairs, the method of tilting the lens and obstructing the cutting edge of the composition is also used. The height difference and the picture segmentation are used to extend the distance between people, highlighting indifference and alienation.
In the attic room, Fatih Akindo basically gave up the front and back shots, using a mid-range double shot to show the violence of the characters, the sudden silence between people, and capture the flow of suffocation in the mumbling. Feeling and love are unspeakable. In "Golden Gloves", Fatih Akin is an unconventional genre film, using a camera lens to get rid of our habitual views and prejudices on the object, and to remove the mental rust that we feel is trapped on the object, because only this This kind of "cold-eyed" lens can return the world and the characters to their true original appearance.
Therefore, the heavy taste and bloody scene in "Golden Gloves" is just to create a kind of reality, so as to stimulate the nerves of the audience, eliminate numbness, attract attention, and revive rationality in order to successfully convey the subjective thoughts he wants to convey through the film. Fatih Akin "opened" the inner world of the perverted murderer Honka, allowing the audience to see the tragedy of an era through his communication with the outside world.
Fatih Akin not only borrowed from Fassbinder on the lens, he, like Fassbender , firmly believed in "moving the mind to liberate", and tried his best to reach out the spearhead of criticism and pour out his inner thoughts through film. "Golden Gloves" insists on judging the heavy sense of sin of the German nation with a historical weight .
The film puts the era in Germany in the 70s , with a deep intention. Although there is no direct expression of the devastation of the era, the alienation of people in the era can be glimpsed through the actor Honka and the many second-level characters surrounding Honka. The Honka in the film is not a murderer who is completely mad.
On the surface, the film describes Honka’s murder experience, but the subtext of its practical characteristics is a metaphor for the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s.
At that time, West Germany seemed to have taken off economically, but because of the existence of the Iron Curtain and the separation of the Berlin Wall, many Germans still felt a strong sense of frustration. Honka's low self-esteem and morbidity represent the overall situation of West Germans in the 1970s, and personal anxiety is magnified by society . Under the circumstances of false prosperity and political vassalism, some West Germans were shrouded in despair and fell into decadence. The impoverished material and spiritual life of individuals caused them to gather in bars like "Golden Gloves" day and night, using alcohol to paralyze themselves.
Most of the second-level figures surrounding Honka , including the women killed by Honka, came from this bar. They seem to be alive, but they have long lost their souls, leaving only their aging bodies, degraded brains, and terminal illnesses addicted to alcohol.
The characters appearing in the "Golden Gloves" bar all have distinctive signs of the times, the old SS with impaired hearing and eyesight, the prostitutes who once lived in the concentration camps, the unemployed tramps, and the decadent old women who have nothing to do. Some of them faced the sluggish post-war society, but they missed the "glorious glory" of the war years more and more. They attribute everything to the failure of the war, violence and desire for revenge are accumulated in their hearts;
Some of them began to give up on themselves, numb themselves with alcohol, hate everything, and even hate God. What's more frightening is that social corruption not only breeds in bars, but also quietly occurs in schools outside of bars.
The female student whom Hongka has always been obsessed with, began to be taught by the teacher that "you must learn to have a future", but she still does her own way, ignoring everything by her youth. Finally, under the inducement of young male students, she came to the "Golden Glove" bar, which once again aroused Honka's desire.
At the end of the film, although she had escaped the devastation of Honka who had fallen into madness again, she had never thought that the danger had been so close to her, and the killer followed her through a few streets.
She escaped Honka, but in that era, in a dark corner, there may be another "Honka" waiting for her.
And she is very likely to become the "Golden Glove" bar in the future, those female alcoholics who boasted that she was beautiful when she was young, but are now ugly and aging.
The two young men and women in the film, under the "taught" of the previous generation, are very likely to be mirror-like existences, falling into a cycle of destiny, and decaying, generation after generation.
Let’s look at the middle-aged couple in the film that symbolizes the middle class in Germany . One is working as a cleaner in the company where Honka works, and her husband just lost his job. What's more frightening is that the female cleaner also brought Honka back to hell, turning him back into a demon.
This is the most obvious point of the film . Honka, who was drunk and bruised, originally planned to quit alcohol. Although he went through a painful withdrawal process, he obviously got better, found a new job, and had good interpersonal relationships with others. But everything turned sharply after the glass of wine handed out by the cleaning lady.
Hongka returns to the embrace of alcohol, and the murderous demon who vents lust and violence returns to the world.
Therefore, it was the social situation at that time that created Hongka, and Hongka, who was trapped in it, wanted to escape, but felt helpless. In Fatih Akin’s imagery world, others are hell, love is colder than death, and everyone is an island . Either live in alcohol or end everything with death.
Finally, it needs to be mentioned that in "Golden Gloves", Fatih Akin continues to show that the immigration culture brings problems to Germany.
Paradoxically, in the film, Honka, who lives in the attic, is the bottom of society, while the Greeks below him are among the middle class. That kind of hidden parasitic relationship quietly happened in a small building. People of the two classes usually ignore each other, cursing and repelling each other because of work and life habits.
But when Honka's hidden corpse began to decay, giving birth to maggots, and falling from the cracks in the floor, from top to bottom, onto the delicate Greek dinners, the two classes of people inevitably met in terror.
This kind of "coexistence" and "conflict" is obviously more vigorous than the recent hot Korean film "Parasite". "Golden Gloves" realizes the instructive function of the movie in a cold, terrifying, and realistic way . It is precisely because the director has the courage to act ugly that the film itself has become the noble last refuge.
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