IFG 51: Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981)

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cast: Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne Moreau, Laurent Malet, Hanno Pöschl

Release Date: August 1982

IMDb Rating: 6.6

Trailer:

What the critics said:

BECAUSE it happens to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film, ”Querelle” has had imposed on it a terrible burden. Even the ads imply this, describing it with solemnity as ”Fassbinder’s last statement,” which it is, but only in terms of chronology. It’s as if we were meant to believe that Fassbinder knew he was going to die last June and prepared ”Querelle” as a summation of everything that had gone before. It’s not. Fassbinder had many talents, but soothsaying wasn’t one of them.

”Querelle” is a mess, and of value mostly for the ways in which it defines the particular strengths and limitations of the most important European film maker of his generation. In relation to the great films that mark his short but prolific career, ”Querelle” is a detour that leads to a dead end. In earlier days, Fassbinder would have simply moved on to the next project. That, unfortunately, is not now possible, and we are stuck, more or less, with this film as a coda, which Fassbinder never intended.

”Querelle,” which opens today at the Cinema Studio, the Manhattan and the Waverly Theaters, is one of the riskiest films Fassbinder ever made, the result of hundreds of bold choices, some of them intelligent, but almost all of them wrong.

To begin with, there was his decision to make a film based on ”Querelle de Brest,” the 1953 Jean Genet novel about an incredibly beautiful and depraved French sailor, who, in the way of Genet, finds salvation in the utter degradation by which he denies the real world to create a world of his own. ”Querelle de Brest” is the most conventionally coherent of Genet’s novels, of which ”Our Lady of the Flowers” is the masterpiece, but it isn’t easily adapted to the screen, especially by Fassbinder.

Fassbinder’s skepticism and his gifts as a social satirist have little to do with Genet, a poet and a believer whose devotion is expressed through a series of reversals of Christian dogma and rituals. Fassbinder, for all of his loudly proclaimed anarchist views, was always a true product of the bourgeoisie, a dutiful son to a fond mother, who frequently appeared in his films.

Genet, born illegitimate, raised in foster homes, went on to spend most of his earlier life in prisons. He is truly classless, essentially stateless, identifying – when he is able to identify with anyone outside himself – only with what the gentle folk call the dregs of society: stool pigeons, pimps, prostitutes, thieves and murderers.

Virtually the only bonds between Fassbinder and Genet are a willingness to shock and an aggressive lack of self-consciousness about their homosexuality. In almost every other way, they are not opposites but representatives of different dimensions of time and space.

Fassbinder seems to acknowledge their differences in the opening credits, in which it’s stated that ”Querelle” is ”about” the Genet novel, instead of being based on it. This doesn’t get him off the hook. It would have if Fassbinder had then gone on to make a Fassbinder film, but ”Querelle” is a hopeless, incoherent muddle of Genet’s novel and Fassbinder’s sensibility.

The film takes place in an unmistakably mythical port called Brest, represented by a smashingly spectacular, highly stylized unit set of the sort that works more often in the theater than in a film. The world of this film is theatrically dreamlike, which again has not much to do with Genet, whose fictional world is fantastic but filled with its own realistic sights, sounds, odors and sensations of heat and cold.

It’s also foreign territory to Fassbinder, whose gift was to be able to distill from reality not fantasy but a super-reality, always attached to specific time and place. Fassbinder has helped himself to Genet’s characters and to many of the novel’s situations and then used them, half-heartedly, to score his own points – sort of. The film is so chopped up and fey that it’s not possible to know exactly what its points are.

The film follows the descent into Hell of the young sailor Querelle, described by Genet as ”the Angel of the Apocalypse” but who, as played by Brad Davis, looks like a clean-cut American college boy dressed for a costume ball.

As Querelle moves through this dramatically lighted stage set called Brest, he murders one sailor, seeks ”execution” for his crime by allowing himself to be brutally sodomized, which he enjoys, and then finds his own salvation by becoming a stool pigeon. Querelle hands over to the police a friend, a simple-hearted Polish dockworker, who accepts responsibility for his own crimes as well as Querelle’s.

Querelle also has a sort of running, love-hate relationship with his brother, Robert (Hanno Poschl), a masochistic affair with Mario (Burkhard Driest), a police inspector who wears Hell’s Angels drag, and a somewhat less satisfactory relationship with Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), the brothel madam who is Robert’s mistress. Watching all this, as if he were a peeping tom, is Lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero), a naval officer on Querelle’s ship. Seblon, dressed in a uniform out of ”The Student Prince,” worships Querelle from afar, that is, from his closet, and dictates his longings into a handy tape recorder.

From time to time throughout the film, Fassbinder inserts title cards on which are printed patches of original Genet prose, as if the director were trying to establish connections between the film and the book, even as they are drifting aimlessly apart.

For something that might be called a Fassbinder-Genet joint venture, ”Querelle” is exceedingly discreet, resolutely unshocking and unprovocative. If it spoke with a single voice – it was apparently shot in English but is being released here with a German sound track – that voice would be a steady drone.

Except for some things that Miss Moreau does, ”Querelle” is not only humorless but also uncharacteristically witless. The actors aren’t called upon to act but to keep a straight face, which may sometimes be difficult for the audience. Mr. Davis, Mr. Nero and Miss Moreau do what they can, but they behave like people abandoned in a foreign country without money or passports.

Miss Moreau has more than her share of thankless lines, as well as one unintentionally hilarious song to sing. The music is by Fassbinder’s talented long-time collaborator, Peer Rabin, and the lyrics by Oscar Wilde: ”Each man kills the thing he loves … dahdee-dah-dee-dah.”

Like so many other things in ”Querelle,” they aren’t good enough.

Vincent Canby, The New York Times, April 29, 1983

Please click to enlarge.

Ed Sikov, Cinéaste, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1983), pp. 40-42

IFG Ratings:

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  4Porcelli

  Arpatilaos

  Robert

  Sean

Average IFG Rating: 8.29

REMINDER:

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