Querelle (1982)
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Film Review

It is unfortunate that Rainer Fassbinder's best known film (certainly outside his native Germany) is one that is least representative of his work and, paradoxically, his most challenging.  Too often dismissed as a piece of pretentious gay erotica, Querelle has only recently (twenty years after its first release) come to be regarded in a favourable light and is now widely considered to be one of Fassbinder's most important films.  A Franco-German production, it is one of the few films that Fassbinder recorded with English dialogue, something that earned it far more exposure than his previous German-language films.   The film's lurid subject matter (specifically its abundance of explicit sex scenes) has inevitably earned it the status of a gay cult classic, and this is probably what has most prevented it from achieving the serious critical attention that it so obviously merits.

Whilst it is a long way from being Fassbinder's best film, Querelle is, arguably, the one which sheds most light on his complex and enigmatic personality, hinting at the existential preoccupations that haunted him in his final years, the inner battles that made him an obsessive workaholic and drove him to a premature death.  It was whilst he was working on this film that Fassbinder learned that his former lover and closest friend El Hedi ben Salem had committed suicide whilst in prison.  Fassbinder would himself die from a drugs overdose, aged 37, shortly after completing work on the film.  The sense of unreality and hopeless yearning which infects every frame of Querelle, and which has no equivalent in any previous Fassbinder film, is perhaps nothing less than the reflection of a human mind that is slowly unravelling in the face of a deep personal loss and a longing for repose.  Fassbinder may not have intended this to be his last film, but it is hard to imagine a more fitting postscript to his remarkable filmmaking career.  Querelle is a piece of cinema that is every bit as provocative, enigmatic and elusive as the creative genius who conceived it.

The film is loosely based on the homoerotic novel Querelle de Brest by the renowned existential French writer and poet Jean Genet (who drew his inspiration from Herman Melville's Billy Bud).  On the face of it, the worlds of Fassbinder and Genet would appear to be lightyears apart.  The only thing the two men have in common is the degree to which their art would be shaped and illuminated by their homosexuality; apart from that, they seem to inhabit completely different universes.  And yet watching Querelle you begin to realise that Fassbinder and Genet are not opposites, but possibly two facets of the same personality, both intensely preoccupied with the most profound mysteries of nature: existence, love and desire.  It is in his attempt to visualise Genet's labyrinthine, multi-layered novel that Fassbinder manages to reinvigorate his own creative powers and attain a deeper level of poetic expression.  Had he lived, this could have the been the beginning of Fassbinder's greatest period of artistic endeavour, one that may well have revolutionised cinema at a time when it was facing its own greatest crisis of identity.

Stylistically, Querelle is very different from any other film that Fassbinder made.  Shot entirely on a sound stage with sets that are more symbolic than realistic, the film has a dreamlike artificiality that is the near-antithesis of a Rainer Fassbinder film.  A sea fort is adorned with huge phallus-shaped defences, a constant reminder of what the film is about - the male sex's mortal fear of impotence.  The sets are bathed continually in an unchanging ethereal orange glow, as if time is frozen and the characters depict ghosts living in an eternal sunset.  The extreme stylisation gives the film a brutality that Fassbinder could never have achieved had he gone for a more realistic approach, and this works beautifully to expose the devastating subtext of Genet's great novel, which is essentially that love is too beautiful and perfect a thing for man ever to hold onto, so he must disfigure and destroy it, recast it as something abhorrent and twisted.  The famous line from Oscar Wilde's poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol ("Each man kills the thing he loves..."), itself mutilated beyond recognition when sung by Jeanne Moreau as a tawdry barroom ballad, provides the film with its apt strapline.

And yet, whilst Querelle is visually very different to any other Fassbinder film, it embraces themes which recur over and over in this director's wide-ranging oeuvre.  The need that men have to prove themselves continually, to assert their masculinity and never be dominated by others (so essential to the German psyche), is something that features in many of Fassbinder's films.  The character Querelle (Brad Davis at his most stunningly photogenic) is the quintessential Fassbinder antihero - morally ambiguously, deeply flawed, driven by a powerful need to dominate others, here through his unbridled sexual prowess.  And yet, for all his macho posturing, Querelle is nothing more than a weak and confused man, a Hamlet with an overdeveloped libido.  He wants to dominate (he asserts his masculine supremacy by needlessly killing a man, but with a lover's tenderness), and yet his natural inclination is to submit, to yield to someone stronger (which he does memorably in the film's most controversial and shocking sequence).  Querelle is a paradox and a contradiction.  He represents what every man wants to be (strong, self-willed, assertive, free) but he is also what every man fears becoming (submissive, treacherous, a slave to the most base impulses).  He submits to gay sex whilst confidently (and unconvincingly) asserting it means nothing; in doing so he shows us what he (and perhaps every man) is: a closet bisexual who regards the homosexual part of his nature as a deadly affront to his masculinity.

You don't have to look too closely to see that every other male character in the film is a virtual copy of Querelle.  All try to live up to the stereotype of male invincibility (solid, impregnable as a sea fortress), but all are shown to be weak, confused bi-guys who resort to subterfuge and bluster to mask their lack of manliness and moral consistency.  The only character in the film who has any real strength and moral conviction is a woman, the implacable Madame Lysiane (perfectly portrayed by Jeanne Moreau at the summit of her sensual powers).  This too is a Fassbinder trademark.  In all of Fassbinder's films, it is the women who are the stronger, more resolute, more unambiguous sex.   Lysiane is what Querelle and all men desire to be but never can be, an impregnable rock that is forever firm and erect in a sea of change and confusion - she has no need to prove herself, no need to dissemble as she takes her pleasures.  Whilst the Querelles of this world are condemned to squander their time and energies in futile games of macho rivalry, endlessly preoccupied with erectile function (or rather dysfunction), their Lysiane counterparts are free to get on with more worthwhile and constructive things, such as propagating the species and preventing men from completely annihilating one another.   Querelle is not only Fassbinder's most pointed lament on the abject failings of the male sex, it is also quite possibly his most eloquent paean for women, the nobler sex.  It is not his greatest film, but it is a wise and poignant message to leave us with.

Film Synopsis

Arriving at the French port of Brest, the crew of the ship Le Vengeur can hardly wait to go ashore and avail themselves of the town's distractions, the foremost of which is the bar-brothel Feria, which is run by the sultry temptress Madame Lysiane.   The latter is having an affair with a man named Robert and is unaware that her husband Nono is busy servicing her prospective clients before they get to her.  One man who appears keen to bed Madame Lysiane is Robert's brother Querelle, a handsome young sailor whose good looks arouse the interest of both sexes.   Querelle knows that he must throw dice with Nono if he is to win a night of passion with Lysiane, but he deliberately loses to allow Nono to have his way with him.  Liberated by this sexual encounter, Querelle contrives to allow another man, Gil, to take the blame for a murder he committed immediately after coming shore.  Querelle is strangely attracted to Gil, who closely resembles his brother, and imagines that he is in love with him.  When Gil reciprocates his feelings, Querelle decides to help him escape, but then makes up his mind to betray him.   Each man kills the thing he loves...