Wildwechsel (Jail bait AKA Wild Game) is the only Fassbinder film I can think of that focuses on youth; a look at the time before his fated characters’ faces have become puffy with booze and pills, and before the string of heartbreaks have left them condemned to cycles of destruction. It opens, however, not on the teenage couple that become its centre, but on the girl’s parents. It’s early in the morning and father wants them to go back to bed. Mother looks herself over in the mirror, counting the wrinkles. “Chubby women like me stay younger longer” she rationalises, but her mind is more on the lottery numbers…
Their daughter, Hannie, is still in bed. She is 14, but has the body of someone years older. As the film progresses she will become involved with Franz, a slaughterhouse worker 5 years her senior, who first will be jailed for statutory rape, and later get her pregnant. Hannie and Franz’s relationship is like an embryo of some other, more famous, Fassbinder romances: psychical, sado-masochistic, dependant and doomed.
Eva Mattes, who had played Petra von Kant’s spurned daughter a couple of years earlier, gets her generational revenge here. A calculated cruelty hides behind her puppy-fat exterior, as she manipulates her lover into patricide by proxy. Fassbinder’s take on youth is complex and cynical. This isn’t a story of innocence lost or stolen, but of an inevitable decline. The loss of virginity is no big deal. "It had to happen, and now it happened. It doesn't matter." Hannie is one of Fassbinder’s typically compromised victims; perhaps the gulf in morals between this generation and the last isn't as vast as we would like. Her father pines for the years of National Socialism, but resents them for taking his youth. “We weren’t young, we were soldiers.”
Like always, the characters are trapped, forever standing in doorways they fail to exit, or pinned by down symbolic mise en scene (replacement prison-bars are everywhere, except in the scenes of Franz in custody, where he seems strangely free.)
Their daughter, Hannie, is still in bed. She is 14, but has the body of someone years older. As the film progresses she will become involved with Franz, a slaughterhouse worker 5 years her senior, who first will be jailed for statutory rape, and later get her pregnant. Hannie and Franz’s relationship is like an embryo of some other, more famous, Fassbinder romances: psychical, sado-masochistic, dependant and doomed.
Eva Mattes, who had played Petra von Kant’s spurned daughter a couple of years earlier, gets her generational revenge here. A calculated cruelty hides behind her puppy-fat exterior, as she manipulates her lover into patricide by proxy. Fassbinder’s take on youth is complex and cynical. This isn’t a story of innocence lost or stolen, but of an inevitable decline. The loss of virginity is no big deal. "It had to happen, and now it happened. It doesn't matter." Hannie is one of Fassbinder’s typically compromised victims; perhaps the gulf in morals between this generation and the last isn't as vast as we would like. Her father pines for the years of National Socialism, but resents them for taking his youth. “We weren’t young, we were soldiers.”
Like always, the characters are trapped, forever standing in doorways they fail to exit, or pinned by down symbolic mise en scene (replacement prison-bars are everywhere, except in the scenes of Franz in custody, where he seems strangely free.)
The film is little seen today, perhaps because of the still troubling subject matter (Breillat would mine similar territory with 36 Fillette and À ma sœur!, yet Fassbinder’s film remains uncomfortable viewing); but more likely because of legal issues surrounding the film (Franz Xaver Kroetz, author of play on which it was based, branded the film version pornographic and has had some success in getting the film suppressed.) It is as yet unavailable on DVD, but the far from pristine bootleg (see screengrabs) is still well worth a look.
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