Querelle

Jean Genet's queer theory is still cutting edge and controversial. The film version can't begin to encompass all the ideas in the novel, but it stands on its own. This film is stylized and poetic, raw and crass. Tenderness and brutality blend until you can't tell one from the other. Betrayal becomes an act of affection. Submission is empowering.

Characters travel to extremes in their journeys of self discovery. One man seduces his young lover with lecherous statements about the boy's sister, "Imagine what I'd do to her if I were holding her like I'm holding you right now." The same man later rants in a bar, "I'm all man!!! I even f*** guys!" This dichotomy of gender-play and defiant same-sexuality is at the root of Genet's queer theory. Even someone with no knowledge of Genet's philosophy will be struck by its power in this film.

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.

Translating Genet to film is certainly not an easy task since he cares relatively little as a writer for conventional plot and his storyline is essentially the baroque flow of feeling from his inner life. But this film does a masterful job of capturing all the subtle nuance of Genet's poetry in the flow of its' imagery. The mood is intensely introverted and philosophically existential throughout. The sets have the feel of the German Cinema around the time of THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI, and yet the images flow around the angularity of the sets creating a wonderful tension between the characters and their milieu. This is Fassbinder at his very best. And the performance of Brad Davis is outstanding combining a rough, male-like crudeness with the innocence stemming from a young animal's eager naturalness. He creates a character who is forever trying to mask his simplicity, a kind of gothic Angel repeatedly discovering the Vampire stalking him from within. This is in keeping with Genet the writer who displays his suffering poetically, -like a tangle of gilded roses twined about a leper. The whole thing is a marvellous rendering of a kind of languidly sensuous celebration of the darker side of the male psyche. Since Brad Davis also appeared in THE PLAYER, we might say this film is like Huckleberry Finn meeting Nosferatu with a drunken Anne Rice as narrator. Bizarrly brilliant!

After its end, easy to define it as a masterpiece. And the motives are so many than you can reduce them to cast - Jeanne Moreau , Franco Nero, Laurent Malet or, off course, Brad davis, to the illustration of the perspective about homosexuality of Jean Genet , to the touch, so obvious to bsessive, of Tom of Finland art , to the poetry, in bitter sparkles or to the crazness of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

In same measure, it is far to be a film for you like or love it but for see it, time by time, having the feeling than you see it , always, the first time.

It is a film making you, for less two hours, its prisoner. For themes, ambiguity , dialogue, who, at first, sounds so forced, for the music, scenes and portraits of characters, for decisions and vulnerabilities , exposed so simple.

In short, a masterpiece. One far to be easy to define, enough being to feel it.

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.'