Querelle

German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film before his untimely death at the age of 37 from a drug overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. Adapted from the novel "Querelle De Brest" by Jean Genet this film is a visually striking surrealistic homoerotic fable, which starred the late bisexual American actor Brad Davis who was tragically ravaged by AIDS and died at the age of 41 some nine years after this film's release by assisted suicide. This highly stylized film concerns a handsome muscular amoral French sailor named Georges Querelle, played brilliantly by Davis who injects a raw and animistic complexity into role, he comes to terms was his latent homosexuality when his ship docks in the coastal town of Brest, and he makes his way to a local brothel which is run by Madame Lysiane, superbly played by the late great Jeanne Moreau, whose lover is Querelle's brother Robert, well played by Hanno Poschi, whom he has an odd love-hate relationship with. During his time in the coastal town Querelle will become a murderer and a magnet for a bunch of unsavory characters whom he meets for rough gay sex. Franco Nero superbly plays an officer from Querelle's ship that is enamored with him and worships him secretly from afar, and records his feelings on tape. Good direction by Fassbinder with impressive cinematography by Xaver Schwarzenberger and Josef Vavra. A disturbing art-house motion picture which is not for all tastes.

This attempt to film Genet is commendable in tackling so difficult a work. Fassbinder's scenery is so obviously studio sets that the film takes on a "filmed play" quality. The color is beautiful, and the cast is very attractive. I had difficulty in following the proceedings, and much of the printed quotatons were puzzling. Some of the fantasy inserts were likewise confusing. But the strong cast made up for many of these weak points and raised the film to a level it would otherwise never have achieved. It is still lesser Fassbinder, but an often fascinating film to watch.

I don't think I quite understood what "Querelle" was about but the good aspect of it is that you at each view you get new things, and it grows on you. Far from being a masterpiece like "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" or "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant", but this is a very good project directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his last and the one he got some of the heaviest criticism of his career. In a way, the most tragical of all of his works after being forced to cut part of it to get a release in America, probably the first time he ever had to back down and cut something he directed.

Based on author Jean Genet's 1947 novel Querelle de Brest, the movie revolves about Querelle, an Belgian sailor (Brad Davis) who plays with danger with his criminal affairs selling opium and his involvement with male and female, using of his good looks to get what he wants. To him (and to everyone around him) everything's a game in which losing sometimes can be useful (the dice game where he deliberately loses in order to have sex with Nuno, played by Gunther Kauffman). Querelle's a man with many love affairs and relations, center of attention of his own brother (Hanno Pöschl), and their strange "brotherhood", love/hate kind of thing; Nuno, his wife (Jeanne Moreau) owner of a decadent bar where most of the film takes place, and he's treasured from distance by his captain (Franco Nero). The other half of the film explores what can be called of real love between Querelle and a murderer (who is played by the same actor who plays the brother).

The movie is very open when it comes to presenting Querelle's involvements with both genders, specially his sexual scenes with another men, very bold at the time. If the story gets too much on a second plan, since the ideas are somewhat vague, foggy, the high point of enjoyment of the film is seeing Querelle getting well with his mates. For the most part, the movie isn't so exciting and is very confusing with its imposition of ideas one on top of another. What's the story in deeper terms? A man discovering his sexuality, trying new things or he's trying to find real love? Is he testing his moves as a player or he's just a man trying to survive using of his talents? Fassbinder intrigues us more with the whole concept of man being a product of his environment, adapting to his (and others) needs and what he makes here (don't know if the same happen in the book) is a strange fantasy world where everyone is bisexual or have more inclination towards another man, enjoying endless sunsets created on fake sets, surrounded by large columns resembling phallic elements. The script is more like a literary work than a cinematic experience, with several cards expressing Querelle's inner thoughts or the captain's romantic narration watching the love of his life, working all sweaty.

Rainer had his reasons and perhaps we'll never know what motivated him making this film in the way he did, but the artist is deeply immersed in this work, putting elements of his life, his love and all (including a dedication to El-Hedi Ben Salem, one of his partners, who died that year). A little bit butchered, panned by critics and part of the public, a distressing experience to the director who wasn't much in his best moment in life but with career on the top, but sadly he died and this was his last film. Not much of a great swan song but very admirable in several ways. The risk taken by Brad Davis was incredible and unfortunately he paid the price for it, barely appearing on well-known films or great projects. But what a performance! He's really good, very desirable and makes the character be what he needs to be. How many times you've seen a film where it is sold to us someone who is so beautiful and attracts everything and everyone but when you look at, it doesn't cause such effect? Davis was all that.

Here's a tale about immorality, manipulation, the right of the strongest to conquer anything, ultimately about the individuals who kill the things he love. Men, essentially. 7/10

Fassbinder's swan song takes everything to the extreme. So much so that critics have never quite been able to stomach it.

'Querelle' is such a stunning work of art on several levels: the Navy dockyard set with its near-sepia hazy opiate yellows and browns (contrasting against the colour of the sailors' outfits, the brilliant whiteness a parody of purity), evoking both sickness and a perpetual dusk of hard-ons, repression, indulgence and violence; the cinematography, some of the best in any Fassbinder film, capturing the actors' reflections in mirrors as the camera coolly observes the lovers they talk to (or 'at') -- lust in an impenetrable frame in which no one can be satisfied and everyone has their own agenda; the incredible erotic sexual ambiance that manages to be both appealing and threatening; the acting (Davis clearly finds this unsubtle role liberating after working in the very gay yet very homophobic world of Hollywood). I find more to enjoy in this film every time I view it.

The critics got it wrong here; perhaps a little too much sodomy for their bourgeois tastes? Let's see.. it has Brad Davis shirtless and sweaty in almost every scene (the one in which he's covered in oil and grease has to be the money shot); it features Jeanne Moreau being dramatic and elegant and making statements about men's 'pricks' (in a role that seemingly couldn't have been anyone else's); it's an adaptation of a work by the brilliant Jean Genet; it's directed by the incredible Fassbinder; it has lines like, 'my cock came out covered in s--t, if you want to know' -- how could all of this equal a bad film? Not in my book.

The film ends with an ode to Genet: 'Apart from his books we know nothing about him. Not even the date of his death, which he supposes to be near.' Fassbinder would be dead before the film was released, four years before Genet. And besides his films, we know nothing about Fassbinder.

'Querelle' is Fassbinder's final 'f--k you.'

A R.W. Fassbinder double-feature binge (Chinese ROULETTE 1976 and QUERELLE 1982, his swan song) coincides with a starting point for me to access his oeuvre, as one of the pioneer of modern German cinema, Fassbinder has a burning-too-fast career orbit, as if he was exerting all his energy in cranking out films before his dooming self-indulgent suicide at the age of 37 (with more than 40 works done in 15 years). Yet two films must have its restricted view, but Fassbinder films' mindset nevertheless more or less could be conjectured from them, and his stylish flourish is also mesmerizingly toxic.

Both films could adopt themselves comfortably into a theatrical play not the least courtesy of their (mostly or exclusively) in-door locales, for Chinese ROULETTE, it has a secular tone, 90% of the film takes place inside a rural mansion, with familial secrets, connubial deceptions, mother-daughter hatred, the divide of social strata, vindictive self-destruction viciously unfold and infuse a deleterious corruption even to the onlookers, all is triggered by the innocuous eponymous game. While QUERELLE is projected on more ritualized dark amber light maroon background setting stimulating a claustrophobic oppression of lust and desire within a handful locations (the faux-deck of a ship ashore, the phallus worship Hotel Feria Bar, an underground tunnel for hideaway), a male-dominant sexual obsession mingled with blatant homosexual thrust to an astounding incestuous extremity, brilliantly done via an intuitive candor.

Mirror is a recurrent item in both films, exposes the other-half which reflects the true id inside one's soul, in Chinese ROULETTE the stunning flux of the stationary tableaux interlacing two or three out of the eight characters orchestrates a scintillating picture of a guilt-and-punishment visual symphony with swishy panache; in QUERELLE, mirrors reduce their occurrence but the conscientiously measured compositions transpire an even more ostentatious narcissism with a sultry plume of hormone-excreting rugged contours of male bodies.

QUERELLE is adapted from Jean Genet's novel "QUERELLE DE BREST", whose literature text also introduced through the soothing voice-over of an unknown narrator, the film does stage a sensible amount of poetic license to filter a vicarious compassion through a singular mortal's inscrutable behavioral symptoms; in Chinese ROULETTE, a prose (or poem) soliloquy of androgyny also contrives to reach the same effect (but sounds a trifle recondite when contextualizing it under the film's incumbent situation). Anyhow Fassbinder is a trailblazer in defying the mainstream's prejudices, and very capable of visualize and dissect the tumor of humanity.

The cast, there are 8 characters in Chinese ROULETTE, with almost equal weight in the screen time, but it is the youngest one, Andrea Schober (under Fassbinder's guidance for sure), the crippled girl seeks for revenge to her parents' betrayal and negligence, teaches all of us a lesson (how selfish we are to find a scapegoat for every bit of repercussions happen to us) with such acute insight, fearless audacity and extreme measures. While big name (Anna Karina) and other Fassbinder's regulars (Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Ulli Lommel) all end up licking their own wounds in the corner.

In QUERELLE, Brad Davis (a real-life AIDS fighter then) is valiant, his masculinity and sinewy physique defies all the stereotyped treatment of gay men in the media, injecting a raw and visceral complexity into Querelle's spontaneous promiscuity and sporadic anger. Hanno Pöschl may fall short to guarantee the vigorous duality required for his two roles, but the gut- bashing combats (or playing) between two brothers fabricate the most erotic intimacy has ever been presented on the screen. Two veterans, Franco Nero is either recording his secret affection in the cabinet or wandering near Querelle from oblique angles; the fading beauty Jeanne Moreau, hums "Each man kills the things he loves", and is lost in her own fantasy of the banquet she can savor.

Personally I incline towards QUERELLE's unconventional approach to kill off the ambiguities of sexual orientation and examine the most primal desire made with blood and flesh, but Chinese ROULETTE achieves another form of success, it maintains a serene aplomb above all the vile assault and bitter turbulence, like the unspecified pistol shot at the coda, no matter who bites the dust, a bullet is never an ultimate solution to all the problems.