Querelle

Querelle is a 1982 English-language arthouse film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and starring Brad Davis, adapted from French author Jean Genet's 1947 novel Querelle of Brest. It was Fassbinder's last film, released shortly after his death at the age of 37.

Plot
The plot centers on the handsome Belgian sailor Georges Querelle, who is also a thief and murderer. When his ship, Le Vengeur, arrives in Brest, he visits the Feria, a bar and brothel for sailors run by Madame Lysiane, whose lover, Robert, is Querelle's brother. Querelle has a love/hate relationship with his brother: when they meet at La Feria, they embrace, but also punch one another slowly and repeatedly in the belly. Lysiane's husband Nono works behind the bar and also manages La Feria's illicit affairs with the assistance of his friend Mario, the corrupt police captain.

Querelle makes a deal to sell opium to Nono. During the execution of the deal, he murders his accomplice Vic by slitting his throat. After delivering the drugs, Querelle announces that he wants to sleep with Lysiane. He knows that this means he will have to throw dice with Nono, who has the privilege of playing a game of chance with all of her prospective lovers. If Nono loses, the suitor is allowed to proceed with his affair. If the suitor loses, however, he must submit to anal sex with Nono first, according to Nono's maxim: "That way, I can say my wife only sleeps with arseholes." Querelle deliberately loses the game, allowing himself to be sodomized by Nono. When Nono gloats about Querelle's "loss" to Robert, who won his dice game, the brothers end up in a violent fight. Later, Querelle's brother becomes Lysiane's lover, and Querelle has sex with Mario.

Luckily for Querelle, a builder, Gil, murders his work mate Theo, who had been harassing and sexually assaulting him. Gil hides from the police in an abandoned prison, and Roger, who is in love with Gil, establishes contact between Querelle and Gil in the hopes that Querelle can help Gil escape. Querelle falls in love with Gil, who closely resembles his brother. Gil returns his affections, but Querelle betrays Gil by tipping off the police. Querelle cleverly arranged it so that the murder of Vic is also blamed on Gil.

A perennial undercurrent in the film is that Querelle's superior, Lieutenant Seblon, is in love with Querelle, and constantly tries to prove his manliness to him. Seblon is aware that Querelle murdered Vic, but chooses to protect him.

The film ends with the sailors aboard Le Vengeur, presumably about to leave port. A heartbroken Lysiane, spurned by Querelle, conducts a tarot reading for Robert: she realizes that he and Querelle were never brothers after all. As Lysiane laughs maniacally, we see Querelle's birth record transcribed on-screen.

Cast

 * Brad Davis as Querelle
 * Franco Nero as Lieutenant Seblon
 * Jeanne Moreau as Lysiane
 * Laurent Malet as Roger Bataille
 * Hanno Pöschl as Robert / Gil
 * Günther Kaufmann as Nono
 * Burkhard Driest as Mario
 * Roger Fritz as Marcellin
 * Dieter Schidor as Vic Rivette
 * Natja Brunckhorst as Paulette
 * Werner Asam as Worker
 * Axel Bauer as Worker
 * Neil Bell as Theo
 * Robert van Ackeren as Drunken legionnaire
 * Wolf Gremm as Drunken legionnaire
 * Frank Ripploh as Drunken legionnaire

Production
According to Genet's biographer Edmund White, Querelle was originally going to be made by Werner Schroeter, with a scenario by Burkhard Driest, and produced by Dieter Schidor. However, Schidor could not find the money to finance a film by Schroeter, and therefore turned to other directors, including John Schlesinger and Sam Peckinpah, before finally settling on Fassbinder. Driest wrote a radically different script for Fassbinder, who then "took the linear narrative and jumbled it up". White quotes Schidor as saying "Fassbinder did something totally different, he took the words of Genet and tried to meditate on something other than the story. The story became totally unimportant for him. He also said publicly that the story was a sort of third-rate police story that wouldn't be worth making a movie about without putting a particular moral impact into it".

Schroeter had wanted to make a black and white film with amateur actors and location shots, but Fassbinder instead shot it with professional actors in a lurid, expressionist color, and on sets in the studio. Edmund White comments that the result is a film in which, "Everything is bathed in an artificial light and the architectural elements are all symbolic."

Stylistically, the film is inspired heavily by the works of erotic artist Tom of Finland. Besides costume design and hair styles, actors were posed in silhouettes and scenarios common to Tom Of Finland artwork. "The director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took obvious cues from Tom of Finland in his 1982 film adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel Querelle. As the eponymous lead, actor Brad Davis was Tom’s sailor come to life."

Soundtrack

 * Jeanne Moreau – "Each Man Kills the Things He Loves" (music by Peer Raben, lyrics from Oscar Wilde's poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol")
 * "Young and Joyful Bandit" (Music by Peer Raben, lyrics by Jeanne Moreau)

Both songs were nominated to the 1984 Razzie Awards for "Worst Original Song".

Release
Querelle sold more than 100,000 tickets in the first three weeks after its release in Paris, the first time that a film with a gay theme had achieved such success. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which categorizes reviews as positive or negative only, the film has an approval rating of 63% calculated based on 16 critics comments. By comparison, with the same opinions being calculated using a weighted arithmetic mean, the rating is 6.10/10. Writing for The New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that Querelle was "a mess...a detour that leads to a dead end." Penny Ashbrook calls Querelle Fassbinder's "perfect epitaph: an intensely personal statement that is the most uncompromising portrayal of gay male sensibility to come from a major filmmaker." Edmund White considers Querelle the only film based on Genet's book that works, calling it "visually as artificial and menacing as Genet's prose." Genet, in discussion with Schidor, said that he had not seen the film, commenting "You can't smoke at the movies."