QUERELLE (1982)

Ever since QUERELLE inadvertently turned out to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film (dead at 37 from a drug overdose), advocates & apologists for the wildly prolific/wildly uneven German filmmaker have bent over backwards (symbolically!) to configure it into something worthy of a high position in the Fassbinder canon.  But it doesn’t stick.  Conceived to look like a theatrical living-puppet adaptation of the Jean Genet novel (less PUNCH & JUDY than PUNCH & PUNCH), it plays out on highly artificial unit stage sets (lit to glow in eternal ‘Golden Hour’ tones more crepuscular orange than gold), as it parses a passel of passes from sailors in port, visiting brothels & bars in search of sex, booze and drug deals.  (Well, less sex than available orifice, any port in a storm.)  Brad Davis, physically very ‘Tom of Finland’, is Querelle, object of desire/bringer of death, who ought to be the leading figure (see title), but somehow is less interesting than everyone else hanging around.  Jeanne Moreau is the moody ballad singing wife of the bar owner who deflowers Querelle; and Franco Nero, in a remarkably wilt-free, crisp white Lieutenant’s suit, longs for unavailable sailors.  Plus frequent stops for on-screen quotes from Genet.  You keep expecting (hoping?) the whole show will morph into a Second Viennese School lyric drama by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg or Anton Webern.  Though with Fassbinder’s limited pallette and texture he’d never make it past three or four of the 12-tones needed to complete a serial row.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Considering the quality of films Fassbinder made immediately preceding this (VERONIKA VOSS/’82; LOLA/’81; LILI MARLEEN/’81), you have to go back to DESPAIR/’78 to find him similarly off-form.  And as that was his most recent attempt at an English-language project, perhaps he was one of the many European directors who floundered when away from his native tongue.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/despair-1978.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *This is getting close to the idea of Thomas Mann’s DOCTOR FAUSTUS, material that might have been a perfect fit for some imagined Fassbinder project.