Wild Game

Fassbinder made this (for TV) right after The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, in the year that Godard made Tout va Bien. Like Godard's film, Fassbinder's is about a male-female relationship in a 'political' context, but here the boy is 19 and the girl only l4, so that their mutual love outrages more than one lower middle class taboo. Despite a final flourish of misogyny (the girl betrays the boy after he's laid his life on the line for her), Fassbinder's stance is very sympathetically unsentimental; and his mixture of caricature (her parents), materialism (the depiction of a factory production line), carefully stylised realism (the central relationship), and a bold physical frankness, is more than usually adroit. The movie created a censorship furore in Germany, not least because the author of the original play (Franz Kroetz) denounced Fassbinder's 'obscene' depiction of his characters.