"Wildwechsel" or "Jail Bait" is a West German German-language movie from 1973, so this one is already over 40 years old and it is a work by German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who made this at the end of the first half of his career. It is a television movie and Fassbinder adapted a play by Franz-Xaver Kroetz here. The film runs for 95 minutes (at least in the version I saw) and got Harry Baer and Eva Mattes German Film Award nominations. The latter even won and strangely enough, both were nominated in the supporting category. Mattes is lead here, no doubt about it, Baer you can make an argument for lead and supporting I guess. I have seen many works by Fassbinder and I cannot say that this one here is really anywhere among my favorites from him. It is certainly not a failure and there are good dramatic moments in here, but I did not enjoy the watch too much. The best thing about the film is probably Mattes' performance, something that can be considered a star-making turn and she was not even 20 in here. No surprise really that she is still enjoying a successful career today many decades later. I sadly cannot say that I enjoyed Baer as much. I never really developed a lot of interest in the character at all and this was also, at least partially, due to his acting. All in all, I would only recommend this film to big Fassbinder fans, it's also really not that easy to find. But even these should be a bit careful as, like I wrote already in the title, I did not feel that this is a typical Fassbinder film, probably because his main characters were usually considerably older than Franz and Hanni.
Review of Jail Bait
