Search - Querelle on DVD

A Captivating Aesthetic

Jack Malebranche | Portland, OR | 10/25/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Querelle is based on Jen Genet's Querelle de Brest. Fassbinder uses Genet's strange mix of blunt dialog and masturbatory narration to create a film that feels more like a revelation of poetry scratched into one of Brest's pissoirs.



Sometimes the characters speak to each other, sometimes they seem to speak in spite of one another, sometimes they simply speak - all too appropriate in the port of Brest, a fertile ground for nearly anonymous, mechanical sex. Though Querelle (perfectly cast), at once vulnerable and malevolent, is the subject of the film's action, the true star is this seething port. Brest is realized entirely on a soundstage, which allows the director to quite literally paint with colored lights and symbolic, often pornographic details. Though ostensibly set somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century, the classic effortlessly melds with the modern (1980s) with the addition of an arcade game and archetypal "homosexuals" that might have stepped from a Tom of Finland drawing.



Querelle is a sailor "in danger of discovering himself", as the mistress of the brothel reveals from her tarot. His strength demands the respect of his peers, his beauty stokes his supervisor's prurient desires, but his inner conflicts drive him to self-destruction as he explores his own deviance. Lust morphs into violence, denial morphs into degradation, sex morphs into violence, and violence morphs into love.



Far from the flip, whitewashed, sexless homosexuality that saturates the media today, Querelle explores the conflicts and complex relations that occur between virile men who discover they desire each other.



In contrast to some other reviewers, I would have to say that this is actually my favorite Fassbinder film--though perhaps it is not representative of his work overall."