The second most anticipated film at this year's Berlin Film Festival is Fatih Akin's "Golden Gloves". It’s hard to imagine that Ah Jin, who was still filming a youthful road movie like "Cheek" three years ago, would come up with an extremely angry and extremely cathartic "Coming Out of Thin Air" in 2017, and this one in early 2019 "Golden Gloves" releases myself more thoroughly.
Fatih Akin’s new film is adapted from the real crimes of Fritz Honka, a notorious serial killer in the 1970s.
Under the global “political correctness” (self-censorship) sweeping across the globe, few people are so focused on showing the ultimate ugliness, ugly faces, ugly scenes, ugly killings, ugly sexual intercourse, ugly humanity, ugliness Desire of the rotting corpse can be clearly smelled across the screen.
Many people will subconsciously compare each other who is bloodier when they see this kind of murderous movie, especially when Lars von Trier’s "This House Is Made By Me" just came out last year, and it was released in January this year. Si also launched a film "Extreme Evil" based on the American serial killer Ted Bundy (also the prototype character of "The Silent Lambs").
Unlike the characters in these two films, "This Room" and "Evil" are both typical elite kinky murderers, enjoying the thrill of blood and killing passion. And "Golden Gloves" is to some extent an anti-elite killing, a weird ghostly and empty anti-human setting that treats other lives cruelly. It is difficult for us to feel the deep inside of the actor Fritz, and we can only capture a certain sense of anger from the minutiae.
In fact, this can be seen in 2017's "Coming Out of Nowhere" about A Jin's creative trajectory and points of interest in the past two years.
The strong visual impact of the new film "Golden Gloves" can even trigger the audience's olfactory response. If Lars von Trier’s "This House Is Made By Me" is a philosophical essay written in a murderous tone, then Akin is also writing his text with stench and cruelty.
1. One killer and four prostitutes
The narrative background of the film is in the 1970s. Although it is based on a real serial killer as its prototype character, the text of the film is based on the 2016 sensational German literary world, Heinz Strunk's novel of the same name, "Golden Gloves".
At the beginning of the film, the identity of Fritz is explained, with Fritz's first killing as the opening introduction. A woman's calf appeared on the cramped, dirty attic bed, with blood-stained stockings pulled onto her calf, and her loose fat butt slumped aside. In a static peeking style, Fritz intended to drag the female corpse out of the door for treatment, but awakened the neighbor, so he had to chop the whole corpse into bloody pieces, where there was no gap.
Like in the novel, Ah Jin's movie is also told from the perspective of a killer. Fritz’s appearance cannot be simply described as ugly, deformed pig nose, scars from scabies on his face, eyes swollen with alcohol, impure mixed blood, sweaty and greasy hair, slightly hunched back The body exudes gastric juice after drunkenness and vomiting. It is the kind of person that most people will avoid two meters away when they see it on the side of the road.
He hangs around in the "Golden Glove" bar all year round. The same wretched bartender, nicknamed "anal", and another regular customer is also an old monster. Former Waffen-SS members, Holocaust survivors, prostitutes, drug addicts, and all kinds of people who have been abandoned by society, all hang around in the "golden gloves" day and night to buy drunk.
Fritz was completely overwhelmed by the sheer incurable impulse of violence, his eyes were full of despair, no trace of humanity could be seen, and his pupils reflected deep contempt for the world around him. Ah Jin's script retains the creepy animality in the novel. It can be said that the film is driven by irrationality, the picture is violent and cold, and there is even no space for breathing. From a stinking scene to another stinking scene, choosing a body to mutilate a body is straightforward.
Of course, there are still two "normal people" set up in the film as functional roles, unknowingly acting as angels and demons. One is Petra, a beautiful girl regarded by Fritz as a sweetheart. She is lusted by monsters in the bar, and her beautiful appearance makes the film slightly dragged from the overflowing urinal back to the normal world. The other is the devil who uses alcohol to lure him back to the sewer when Fritz wants to be a normal person.
Everything in this sewer world is a dull reddish brown. Don't think it is the polished reddish brown wooden furniture in the European aristocratic house, but the dry knot with pus and blood after the abscess is squeezed. Scab. The golden glove bars, lofts, beds, wine bottles, curtains, food, dried blood, body fluids, clothes, stains, even the frothy sewage overflowing from Fritz’s bathroom, and even the pornography on the walls, It seems that it is also full of dirt because of the age.
The unbelievable sense of reality and extreme violence in the film shows that the director purposefully broke the accumulated taste boundaries. It is a provocation and an experiment. It seems to test whether the audience is willing to experience such misogyny and killing. . Facts have proved that people always feel more uncomfortable with heavy tastes, the more they want to see them.
The killing in the movie is not exquisite, it can be said to be dirty and violent, at least there is no so-called "sexual cold beauty" pretending to be artistic. Fritz is a total loser in the film, a cockroach-like bottom, driven by recklessness and spirits. He used free wine to lure the old prostitutes who gathered together back to the small attic with him, and used repeated killings to fill the psychological trauma caused by impotence.
2. The Mermaid of the Sewers
The provocative consciousness in the film "Golden Gloves" is actually very obvious. The more uncomfortable it is, the more it causes backlash. Fritz's purging violence has a deep fit with the degradation of German society in many of Fassbinder's works. It even reminds people of the vulgar aesthetics of the artist George Groz, the social violence composed of drunken gamblers and obese old prostitutes, creating a decadent and dilapidated world, a broken and "stable" whole .
These all constitute the social sketches of West Germany after the war, and even the corresponding settings can be found in the characters and scenes of "Golden Gloves". If you think about historical conspiracy theories, the rotten sewers in the film are exactly what happened in Germany after World War II. It truly depicts West Germany still struggling in the dung-pit of mixed race theory, violent killing, and impotence, and the fate of being dragged back to hell by the devil when trying to move forward.
What’s interesting is that such a personage as an impeccable homicide with a non-pure bloodline seems to be particularly easy to find in history. For example, the German exterminator who used the Middle Eastern descent as the Aryan during World War II to kill. mad. The more a person hates a certain characteristic in himself, the easier it is to madly kill the same kind around him.
Fritz can look at the beauty of youth and Pedra like a goddess. At that moment, even the atmosphere of the film has changed from dirty and bloody to black humor; but facing the old prostitutes who exist like him like maggots, Fri Ci almost dealt with them with the mentality of cleaning up rubbish.
After venting your sexual desires like an inflatable doll purchased online, chop up pieces like a pork leg brought back from the vegetable market, and throw them on the corners of the kennel in the simplest and rude way. They don’t need dignity and no mercy, because they It's not a person, it's a bug or a cockroach, just like him.
Interspersed with pathological jokes in the rotten foul-smelling sewer scene, the strong nasty taste will naturally arouse the unique expectations of the audience. However, Akin's script construction this time is still slightly flat, and the lens language tends to be single, showing a numb and indifferent texture. However, regardless of whether the audience can read or understand, it also causes physical and mental discomfort.
Compared with "This House Is Made By Me", Akin's creative attitude is very vague. At least in the creative process of von Trier, his rigorous, rational, and serious discussion of twisted sex and perverted killing is still very obvious. , Self-introspection in presenting Dante-style hell reality is von Trier’s consistent logic.
But in Ah Jin's new film, it is difficult to define why such uncomfortable extreme scenes are over-presented.
It is wrong to characterize the film as pure nihilism. Although the film more or less implies Akin’s anti-nativism, the metaphors of the SS and concentration camps, the authoritarianism that still exists in German society, etc. It reveals the political irony of the film. But from another perspective, what can this show? The lack of critical thinking in the text makes violence and gore superfluous.
If you want to explore human nature, it is obvious that the film's description of the character's psychological level is not deep enough; if it is to reflect social and political, it is also not fully laid out in symbols and metaphors, and it is neither closed nor open.
So where is the artistry of this Cult film covered with sticky pus? This should still be a question of different opinions, the incredible is often the mother of the incredible, maybe there is really any special purpose that has not been seen?
Author | Peter Pan; Public Number | Seeing Death in Movies
Edit | Riding a Rooftop Boy; please indicate the source for reprinting
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