WATCHED - Querelle

I'm getting towards the end of the films currently available to rent or stream, for my Fassbinder Film Club. Only a few more to go. I've been leaving Querelle til near the end, not because its really good, but because I've never really liked it since I first saw it on its release in 1982. Its a cold hearted movie, with nothing to offer you but an empty place where the soul should be.

Querelle is the most overtly 'gay' themed of all Fassbinder films. He crams it with as many archetypal gay stereotypes possible. The policeman is a leather biker, their are bare chested sailors galore, workmen in hard hats and overalls, men in drag, hookers and a kind hearted, bar owning, brothel madame. 

He dedicated what turned out to be his final film, to a former gay lover El Heidi Ben Salem, who'd recently died. He had committed suicide like another of Fassbinder's former lovers Armin Meier. Many of Fassbinder's lovers, whether male or female, appeared to be left feeling bitter or betrayed in some way afterwards. This is not without significance here. It brings to mind the song that Jeanne Moreau performs twice in the bar - 'Each man kills the thing he loves'.

Fassbinder films have recurring themes, issues he attempts to purge or heal through them. Unwanted, divided in nature, sexually unresolved, the inveterate outsider, incapable of resisting siding with the excluded and oppressed. Querelle is about a man whose sexual proclivities and immoral criminal acts go hand in hand. He has a straight twin brother, who isn't his brother really, who is his rival and is at war with, whom he loves deeply, but cannot bring himself to be sexually intimate with. Instead he allows himself to be buggered by Nono ( No! No! ) the pubs landlord. Its a sort of sexual buggery as baptism and a provocation. Its not pretty. Further acts of murder, robbery and betrayal will follow in its wake.

Querelle about to be abused by Nono

This film version is adapted from a story by Jean Genet - Querelle of Brest. Genet spent his early life as a thief, an outsider, a transgressor, a man happily living beyond acceptable boundaries. His writing was later taken up and championed by Sartre. The heightened melodramatic style of it, his version of the 'theatre of the absurd' made this reprobate underworld accessible to the artistic chattering classes. Most of whom would not go anywhere near burglary or buggery. Today, past transgressors of social norms, are generally being given a much harder time. Is it even feasible these days to draw a firm moral line between a transgressive and an abusive relationship? Its a question that is at the heart of contemporary moral discussiins, the limits of permissiveness. Questions never asked by Genet, or perhaps even Fassbinder for that matter.

Generally I find Genet a preposterous and pretentious writer. Nothing to believe in here. Fassbinder's film tends to sentimentally wallow in Genet's cack handed and leaden symbolism. Genet developed this myth, a philosophy, elevating sailors,  the criminal underworld and gay sex into a transgressive realm, capable of an almost religious level of transformation. Making ridiculous analogies between gay sexual awakening and Enlightenment. Attempting to turn profane acts into sacred ones.

The Captain of the ship that Querelle works on, has the hots for Querelle, holding an unrequited lust/love for him. He's the ultimate voyeur, watching, observing, even stalking Querelle. Creepily recording on tape his thoughts, desires and feelings, expressed in the most flowery and portentous of language. Its pure Genet loaded to the hilt with 'significant' utterances, double underlined just in case you might not have noticed. You even get the obligatory Catholic infused procession of a Christ like figure with a mock cross walking through the streets of Brest. This sort of heavy handed theatricality is all typical Genet. Who mined his self mythologised reputation for all its worth as a writer.

Querelle was Fassbinder's last film before his untimely death from a drug overdose aged 37. It stars Brad Davis and has the semi-divine queen of low life transgressive characters -Jeanne Moreau in it. It ought to be a visual feast, which indeed it is, complete with the gratuitously phallic bollards on the port jetty.  There are scenes in it that possess a poignancy and beauty to them, mostly down to Moreau, who knows a thing or two about turning shit into gold. The set design is stunningly stylised and striking, evoking early expressionistic cinema, with its angular stage like theatricality. Everything suffused by a soft focused halo, a richly lit golden glow. The acting returns to that moderately mannered and affectedly stilted style Fassbinder utilised in his early movies. No cathartic realism here. 

All this tells you, in case you hadn't already noticed, is that this is an unreal fable with little connection to the world. Its Tom of Finland, but in gilded spiritually infused Technicolour.

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8