Film Forum

West Germany/France, 1982
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne Moreau
Approx. 108 min. DCP.

“Fassbinder’s last and posthumously released feature, from 1982 — an adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet — is a bold cinematic renewal by way of an exalted tangle of sex and violence. Brad Davis stars in the title role, as a sailor whose ship pulls into the port of Brest. Disembarking, he plunges into the town’s seamy underworld, which revolves around a bar run by the singer Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau) and a brothel run by her husband, Nono (Günther Kaufmann). In his nocturnal knockabouts, Querelle kills a man, and submits to Nono’s desires as if to punishment. Fassbinder films the ensuing spiral in stylized wide-screen images on theatrical, blatantly artificial sets, and he gives his actors a frozen declamation and stylized choreography to match. The teeming cast of characters fight for power and pleasure while decked out in whimsical costumes and lit in garish colors amid ornate décor; the film’s literary roots show through in florid voice-overs and intertitles. Fassbinder’s heightened, brazen modernity points to new and influential paths that he didn’t live to take. – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Reviews

“QUERELLE may not be Fassbinder’s best film, but it yields considerable pleasures”
– Gary M. Kramer, IndieWire