("In Bavaria, I do not even want to be dead", Herbert Achternbusch). "Wildwechsel/Jail Bait" (1973) is one of the rarest to be seen movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Although it belongs to his earlier period of work, it bears all the signs of perfection of Fassbinder's later work. Despite the fact that the film is based on a stage play by Franz Xaver Kroetz, Kroetz himself reached a courthouse sentence which forbade the broadcasting of this movie immediately after it was finished. The correspondence between Fassbinder and Kroetz - published at the beginning of the 70ies in leading German newspapers - entered history a long time ago. Since Kroetz did not even withdraw his disposal in 1982, when Fasssbinder died, according to German law, there is nothing left to do until to wait for Kroetz'death before this movie can be presented to the public again for which it had once been made.
The movie tells the sad story between Franz and Hanni. He is 19 and she is 15 (so she says in the movie; not 13, as always indicated by people who most possibly have non seen the movie). They fall in love, she gets pregnant. While her mother is rather ambivalent - because of her own education and her unhappy marriage with Hanni's father, the father menaces Franz and declares that he will sue him for making his daughter pregnant. When he says that, sitting at his kitchen table, we see above the Virgin Mother. The question may arise: Does the bible tell us, how old Mary was when she got pregnant from Josef (with whom she was not married)? Does the father, who sits at the bottom of the statue, know that the Jesus-child was born under tragical circumstances after all "civilised" people had refused to give the couple shelter? Is he, who is a Bavarian Christ, aware, that he is doing exactly the same as the population of Bethlehem did some two thousand years ago? That he has no right to have the Virgin Mother hanging there? That his regular visit to the Church on Sundays is just an excuse to start drinking already after mess, in the morning? - Contradictions (or blasphemy) cannot remain long, since they are maximally instable, and so the Bavarian bigotry becomes catastrophically disturbed by Franz and Hanni who cannot see that a child is a child, independent whether it is born inside or outside a marriage, with or without the blessings of the bigots.
The movie tells the sad story between Franz and Hanni. He is 19 and she is 15 (so she says in the movie; not 13, as always indicated by people who most possibly have non seen the movie). They fall in love, she gets pregnant. While her mother is rather ambivalent - because of her own education and her unhappy marriage with Hanni's father, the father menaces Franz and declares that he will sue him for making his daughter pregnant. When he says that, sitting at his kitchen table, we see above the Virgin Mother. The question may arise: Does the bible tell us, how old Mary was when she got pregnant from Josef (with whom she was not married)? Does the father, who sits at the bottom of the statue, know that the Jesus-child was born under tragical circumstances after all "civilised" people had refused to give the couple shelter? Is he, who is a Bavarian Christ, aware, that he is doing exactly the same as the population of Bethlehem did some two thousand years ago? That he has no right to have the Virgin Mother hanging there? That his regular visit to the Church on Sundays is just an excuse to start drinking already after mess, in the morning? - Contradictions (or blasphemy) cannot remain long, since they are maximally instable, and so the Bavarian bigotry becomes catastrophically disturbed by Franz and Hanni who cannot see that a child is a child, independent whether it is born inside or outside a marriage, with or without the blessings of the bigots.