Gossenkind

Speculating solely from his feature-length work Gossenkind (1992) aka Street Kid – the director’s only film released on any format (a long out-of-print VHS tape) in the U.S. and arguably (and rather strangely) his most ‘commercial’ cinematic effort to date, at least outside of Europe – I would assume Austrian actor/auteur Peter Kern (Domenica, Haider lebt - 1. April 2021) had a rather lecherous life-changing experience while still a young man in the prestigious Austrian Vienna Boys' Choir as I have yet to see another pathologically perverse, pederast flick with such a conventionally directed and weirdly ‘wholesome’ pedo-packaging as if the filmmaker was a 'poor man's Spielberg' who lost all restraint in regard to his taboo vice and went 'full fantasy' (as it were). Featuring everything from absurdist kraut auteur Christoph Schlingensief (Tunguska - The Crates Are Delivered!, The 120 Days of Bottrop) playing the seemingly tailored role of a retarded pedophiliac farm-boy who sports a vintage Wehrmacht hat, to a teenage hustler boy who is sadistically sodomized by his mother’s alcoholic boyfriend (while his mama watches on passively), Street Kid is surely not the sort of quirky and cute 'kids film' that it was advertised as, but a unsoundly softhearted NAMBLA-inspired pro-pedophile perv piece directed by an obscenely obese debauchee with a sick sense of cinematic sentimentalism. With its combination of city skaters destroying the concrete, salacious teen sex, and petty proletarian criminality, Street Kid is the virtual gritty celluloid prototype for Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), except with a more coherent narrative and no pretensions towards a realist cinéma vérité aesthetic. Essentially, Street Kid is a completely incriminating (at least, on the director's part) cumming-of-age flick about an androgynous 14-year-old male hustler named Axel Glitter (Max Kellermann) – oddly, of no relation to Gary – who sports of preposterous Elvis pompadour, tight denim jeans, and cowboy boots. As someone whose own mother tells her only son that she couldn't possibly have given birth to him and that he stinks “like a rat,” on top of being regularly abused by his mom’s belligerent boy toy, Axel is not the most appreciated of people with fucked haircuts, but he does get a superlatively sick yet sad self-esteem boast by peddling his aberrant adolescent ass on the streets. Luckily for him, Axel’s life changes, if only momentarily, when he meets a middle-aged bourgeois John and crypto-fag family man named Karl Heinz Brenner (Winfried Glatzeder, who was one of the most popular actors in kraut commie East Germany due to his performance in Heiner Carow’s 1973 hit film The Legend of Paul and Paula); a positively pathetic mensch of the mostly marvelously mundane kind whose own son is around the same age as the boy he is buggering. Needless to say, when a bunch of nosy middle-class types notice that cunning cock-sucker Karl is carrying on with a sardonic street kid who sells sex when not stealing skateboards, thing get a bit troublesome for the fatherly faggot and his surrogate sodomite son. 

 Axel Glitter has been arrested by the police for hawking his body to a variety of old homos a number of times, but as he tells his arresting officer upon questioning during the beginning of Street Kid, “you never get rid of horniness,” hence why prostitution is oftentimes described as the oldest profession in human history, at least among determinedly damned and degenerated, destitute types. Shamelessly borrowing themes and narrative ingredients from German author Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), and, in turn, Italian auteur Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaption starring Dirk Bogarde of the same name, Street Kid also follows a dismally depressed ‘artiste,’ in this case a thespian, who is superficially respected by his colleagues, but does not feel anything resembling personal solace nor closeness towards anyone, not even his undersexed wife nor seemingly autistic son, until first encountering a 14-year-old boy who his call-boy-calling compatriot describes as being, “14. Skin like velvet, and the face of an angel..He kisses like an adult and he is just perfect.” A highly hermetic hidden homo who humps hustler hunks on the side and has fashioned himself a homestead and home life in the sort of banal bourgeoisie bedroom community that he has nothing but completely cloaked contempt for, Karl Heinz Brenner finds a suave savior in the form of a streetwalking pubescent prick-peddler that also happens to be a double illegal piece of high-priced pink-steel property being that he is both underage and a hustler in pre-legal-prostitution Deutschland. Of course, Mr. Brenner is not the only one breaking laws and matrimonial vows in his family, as his lascivious wife also has a rent boy on lease, not to mention the fact that their son, who seems to be no genius, but a sub-beta-male in the making like his father, is being savagely seduced by a seemingly retarded farmboy as devilishly depicted by Aryan aesthetic terrorist Christoph Schlingensief, thereupon giving Street Kid a vague celluloid kindred spirit to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s thrilling psychodrama of inner-familial deceit Chinese Roulette (1976). That being said, one would not even suspect that Street Kid was a kraut flick, if it were not for the fact that all the dialogue is in German, because on top of featuring a number of swarthy semite-like actors that look like they could be the strikingly slim relatives of Peter Kern himself, the thematically taboo-ridden and totally taut celluloid work was directed in a highly contrived and sentimentally stereotypical manner not altogether different from a children’s Disney movie. When gay gentleman Karl Heinz finally gets the gall to “come out” as a kiddy cock-sucker, he wastes no time telling everyone who will listen to him, including a banal bank clerk, who he lets know after withdrawing all of his money from his savings account that, “I’m not going on vacation. I’m driving away with my 14-year-old boyfriend. In a forest we’ll undress and make love.” Of course, like most uptight, materialistic, and severely soulless middle-class types who prefer monetary comfort and mundane modesty to the life of their inner-libertine dreams any day due to an impenetrable fear of spontaneity and a need to conform, bougie boob boy-buggerer soon has second thoughts regarding his Thelma & Louise-esque adventures with Axel and with the law tailing his teen-twink-thrusting tommyrot, it seems like a better time than ever to poof-out. 

 As a sort of minor quasi-Marxist melodrama with a purely pro-pederast symbolic message of "die cis-system," Street Kid is easily one of the most degenerate and perturbing yet puerile cinematic I have ever seen and like Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s adult-fucks-vulnerable-child flick Abuse (1983), one of a handful of curiously conspicuous out-and-out pedophilia-advocating films, which is baffling to me considering it has probably been a good three decades since director Peter Kern was able see and utilize his penis considering his iconic morbid obesity that has played a prominent role in leading to his bloated cult status in the German-speaking world. Ultimately, the most outrageously glaring message of Street Kid is that the only way for a homosexual man to be truly liberated from the heterosexual shackles of good, plain, and fake (as Axel, says himself, he hates “dishonest people”) conventional society is by saving young street rats and acting as a flesh-fondling father figure of sorts or forever remain a closeted cuckold whose wife gets more callow cock than he does. As is typical of the average Hollywood drama, Street Kid features middle-class people that are hyper-hypocritical, decidedly disingenuous, unashamedly and ceaselessly banal, absurdly paranoid of any outsider, and innately artificial in character and emotional, the proletarian ‘street kid” is audaciously authentic (of course, who would be modest after being anally man-handled by your mother's boyfriend as she looks passively on?!), sexually secure, wonderfully witty, and an all-around entertainer. Needless to say, Street Kid is not The Outsiders (1983) directed purported pederast Francis Ford Coppola, but it does prove that Peter Kern is quite the ambitious auteur of commercially campy cinematic deception, if not exactly a successful one.  If you want proof that even pederasts can be sappy romantics, look no further than Peter Kern's Street Kid; a cinema work where sex, sodomy, and sickening smuttiness has never been so shortsightedly sentimental and superlatively superficial.

-Ty E