Querelle

A sailor learns to take, and give, it like a man in this surrealistic adaptation of writer and thief Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest by avant-garde German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a colorful brothel in the port of Brest, proprietor Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) is known for wagering with his customers. Win a throw of the dice, and they get to make love with his wife, Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau); lose, and they must take it from behind by Nono himself. One day, Lysiane reads the tarot for her lover, Robert (Hanno Poschl), and learns in the cards of his intense passion for his brother, Querelle (Brad Davis). Querelle himself soon arrives, and the brothers enact a bizarre greeting halfway between a hug and a wrestling match. Querelle, it seems, is looking for partners in a drug deal; Robert points him in the right direction.

An argument about the merits of sex between men soon leads Querelle to murder his fellow smuggler, Vic (Dieter Schidor). Back at the whorehouse, Querelle loses on purpose to Nono and finds he has a taste for passive gay sex. Meanwhile, fellow sailor Gil, who looks exactly like Querelle's brother (and is played by the same actor), murders one of his compatriots after the brute publicly impugns his manhood. Wanted by the police for both his own crime and Querelle's, Gil goes on the lam. Querelle soon crashes his hideout, and an intense bond develops between the two murderers -- a friendship that will lead Querelle to the greatest love, and the greatest treachery, of his life. Director Fassbinder was in the process of editing Querelle when he died of a drug overdose in June 1982.

Gunther Kaufmann, who plays Nono, was Fassbinder's ex-lover; the film is dedicated to another former lover, El Hedi Ben Salem, the news of whose suicide had just reached the director. Critically derided even by many of Fassbinder's admirers, Querelle earned a Golden Raspberry award for Worst "Original" Song for "Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves," an Oscar Wilde poem set to music by Peer Raben and sung repeatedly by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau had previously starred in Mademoiselle, a Tony Richardson effort co-scripted by Genet. Look for Frank Ripploh, another pioneering German director, in a cameo.

-- Brian J. Dillard

AMG REVIEW:
Like the Jean Genet novel from which it was faithfully adapted, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's swan song is a mannered, sometimes maddening affair whose complex symbolism and inflated rhetoric fly in the face of conventional storytelling. A mixture of guttersnipe philosophy, masculine ritual, and choreographed violence, the film oozes sexual tension and decadent glamour.

But from the endless scenes of Jeanne Moreau singing a shrill cabaret ditty to the obtrusive narration and intertitle quotations, the film is often uncinematic in its translation of Genet's paean to self-actualization through treachery. Peer Raben's ominous electronic score is absolutely killer, as is the production design; the port town of Brest is brought to life on a stylized sound stage full of opulent interiors, cartoonish exteriors, and phallic set pieces. Yet the action moves so slowly, and the script is so talky, that the intricate wit and violent force of Genet's intellect often get lost.

Brad Davis gives a granite-faced lead performance, his hard beauty ripe for the projected fantasies of the other characters (and the audience), while Moreau endures the considerable weight of Genet's unapologetic misogyny in a brave but ultimately masochistic turn. Supporting players such as Gunther Kaufmann, Hanno Poschl, and Franco Nero (the latter as Querelle's besotted lieutenant) also turn in compelling performances. Ultimately, though, this isn't an actors' film. It's a schematic amoral treatise dressed up in Tom of Finland drag -- a concept that works better on the written page than on celluloid.

- Brian J. Dillard

AWARDS:
Competing Film - Rainer Werner Fassbinder - 1982 Venice Film Festival