Querelle: Erogenous Zones

Another landmark of Fassbinder’s early career, The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), is vitalized by his potent engagement with the midcentury melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Fassbinder reworks Sirkian tropes—flamboyant mise-en-scène, calculated hysteria, oppressive social forces—in the tale of a fruit vendor whose existence slowly comes undone. 
In the span of a few short years, Fassbinder achieved a visual style so sophisticated that film critic Manny Farber compared shots from Merchant to the paintings of Fra Angelico, noting 
an aesthetic leap accompanied by a maturing emotional investment in the plight of outcasts, pariahs, and minorities.

Fassbinder was unabashedly queer in both his life and his work. Several of his strongest films deal directly and unapologetically with queer characters and their demimondes. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) is a wildly inventive chamber piece about a bitchy fashion designer’s obsession with a young woman who aspires to model. 
Fox and His Friends (1975) offers a scurrilous critique of class relations among gay men. In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) presents a devastating, cumulatively magnificent portrait of a transgender woman’s love and loss. And in Querelle, Fassbinder transforms a novel by Jean Genet into the horniest of his hothouse melodramas, conjuring a fever dream of devious sailors and salacious leather daddies that confounded audiences upon its release but would become one of his most influential films.

Querelle the novel reads like an emanation of its author’s psyche; Querelle the film externalizes a complementary set of proclivities, compulsions, and inner motivations. That Fassbinder would be drawn to adapt Genet’s work is no surprise, given his own long-standing interest in crime, betrayal, subcultural codes, and a manner of cinematic storytelling that is at once melodramatic and cerebral, emotionally blunt and fiercely experimental. Fassbinder’s approach to adapting Querelle is, in a sense, nearly perfect, and if the way he proceeds may be considered, from a conventional cinematic perspective, inherently flawed—well, it’s a very queer film.

Fassbinder’s first and most inspired conceit is to quite literally stage the material: the film takes place on a single, flagrantly artificial set. The narrative is limited to interconnected zones that establish “Brest”: a ship docked at port, upon which sailors mill about under the watchful, lustful eye of Lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero) and from which they disembark to peruse their pleasures; and the port itself, which is dominated by La Feria, a brothel flanked by two immense stone phalli and overseen by madam Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau). Radiating off La Feria is a geometry of ramparts and alleyways scrawled with obscene graffiti where much of the action transpires. These architectures suggest painted Styrofoam; the trees neatly lining the surroundings appear no more natural than a troop of plastic soldiers; the sun that bathes the exteriors in a viscous, honeyed glow is a perfectly round, perfectly implausible disc that looks pasted onto the soundstage with a glue stick.

Within this emphatically antinaturalistic set, Fassbinder mounts a correspondingly manufactured drama. Querelle (Brad Davis)—a handsome, murderous sailor whose brother, Robert (Hanno Pöschl), is having an affair with Lysiane—arranges an opium deal with the madam’s husband, Nono (Günther Kaufmann). Querelle enlists and then kills an accomplice in the exchange, is sodomized by Nono, gives a hand job to a debauched cop, and enters into an alliance with a laborer who has murdered his coworker. Various jealousies, betrayals, obsessions, and transgressions unfold—all of which are presented in a mise-en-scène of crystalline beauty, and none of which seem aimed at soliciting the viewer’s sympathy.

Querelle is not a movie one falls into; it is a weird object one confronts at a distance. The movie enacts the most unusual—and alienating—synthesis of Fassbinder’s Brechtian, Godardian, and Sirkian influences. The blatant artifice of the production design is mirrored by the performances. In the novel, Querelle is a diabolical avatar of Genet’s obsession with rough trade, a flaming creature aglow with lethal eroticism. In the film, Davis gamely struts his oiled torso but largely seems bewildered by the greasy scenario he finds himself in, wandering through fields of orange chromatism in a daze, pantomiming brawls as if rehearsing a regional production of West Side Story. His character may lend the movie its name, but the movie itself has no center, no real protagonist, no essential drama.

This displacement of Querelle as the obscure object of desire anchoring a lurid, hallucinatory melodrama is of a piece with the film’s overall effect. Querelle’s prodigious aesthetic force overwhelms its human dimension. Or, perhaps more accurately, the movie enlists its ostensible drama as the scaffolding for aesthetic gambits. Fassbinder turns all his bugs into features. The post-dubbed dialogue, much of it conspicuously out of sync, heightens the pervasive dissociation and powerfully contributes to the movie’s extraordinary soundscape. Characters are just as likely to declaim slabs of Genet’s text as they are to engage in conversation. Lieutenant Seblon supplies a running voice-over, at times from the perspective of an omniscient narrator commenting on the action or the film’s personages, at others from within the diegesis as he confesses his ardor for Querelle to a Sony tape deck. That gadget exemplifies the film’s insouciant approach to history, which freely mixes midcentury French naval iconography with early-eighties pop culture. A Suzuki motorcycle can now and then be heard revving offscreen, while inside La Feria a video-game console emits electronic bleeps when Moreau isn’t crooning “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves”—a ballad that was nominated, 
not entirely without justification, for a 1984 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Original Song.

No such knock can be leveled at Peer Raben’s superb score, whose key motif, repeated throughout, begins with notes of menacing instrumentation that dissolve into a sustained choral swell. This refrain is accompanied several times by an annihilation of the narrative via a blinding white screen, upon which are printed excerpts from Genet’s novel, as well as a pair of quizzical extratextual commentaries, one by Plutarch and another credited as deriving from “‘Portrait of Saint-Just’ by Paganel.” Querelle never lets you forget you are watching a movie, just as the rhetorical strategies of Genet’s novel insistently point back to themselves.

Cutting through these formal devices is the dense materiality of sex. Whereas Fassbinder’s previous depictions of queer characters were groundbreaking for their matter-of-factness, Querelle is hyperconscious about how it evokes the pulse and throb of queer desire. Beyond the images of explicit carnality—Nono pinning Querelle to a table and taking him from behind, Querelle sliding his hand down a pair of trousers to stroke the tumescent cop—the entire film is suffused with a tense, lascivious exaltation. I have never seen another movie where the cut and buff of a leather trench coat, quite aside from the person wearing it, felt so palpably horny. Mustachioed hunks, coy twinks, and gender-indeterminate extras flit around the margins of the story like so many patrons idling around the weirdest bathhouse ever. While the plot may be thin, the narrative could be diagrammed as an elaborate roundelay of characters spying, lurking, stalking, and sizing one another up—an arabesque of cruising, the gay art of furtive pursuit and seduction.

Querelle channels the preoccupations of its director’s career and pushes them to new extremes. But is it a great film? Since its posthumous release, it has been met with a mixed reception. Vincent Canby of the New York Times, long one of Fassbinder’s most vocal American champions, considered it “a detour that leads to a dead end” and “the result of hundreds of bold choices, some of them intelligent, but almost all of them wrong.” A later appraisal by Richard Brody in the New Yorker argued the opposite, locating in the film a “heightened, brazen modernity [that] points to new and influential paths” the filmmaker would not live to explore. But others would. The movie’s combination of voluptuous stylization and confrontational sexuality would flower in the New Queer Cinema of the nineties. Todd Haynes is an ardent student of Fassbinder’s work, and his breakthrough feature, Poison (1991), offers its own riff on Genet in the form of an experimental triptych. The punk provocations of Gregg Araki—notably his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, which consists of Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997)—are less overtly indebted to Querelle but carry on its legacy of unabashed queerness and formal risk-taking.

The New Queer Cinema rose amid, and grappled with, the unfolding AIDS crisis. Querelle can now be seen, like the also initially maligned leather-bar noir Cruising (1980), as marking a final cinematic efflorescence of gay sexual abandon before the cataclysm. With its serial-killer tropes and tortured self-loathing, Cruising is no one’s idea of “positive representation,” but the anger it provoked in gay audiences upon its release has largely been replaced by a fascination with its status as a time capsule of an orgiastic underground long gone. Querelle, a movie of the mind, indexes no such historical particularities, yet its impact on visual culture has been decisive. Photos taken by Roger Fritz during the production have been exhibited in prestigious galleries in Berlin and New York. The homoerotic kitsch of artists Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard is Querelle-adjacent, notably in their fondness for the uniforms of 1940s French sailors, a motif also embraced by the legendary fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier, who has cited Fassbinder’s film as an abiding influence.

What are we to make of Querelle today? The neophyte viewer is likely to find more questions than answers, an invitation to explore the riches of Fassbinder’s filmography. And for those returning to its strange pleasures, Querelle remains as seductive, intractable, oneiric, and onanistic as ever.