Stevecorp
Don't listen to the negative reviews
Nessieldwi
Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.
Kinley
This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows
semiotechlab-658-95444
"Homosexuality is not a topic at all in this movie", Rainer Werner Fassbinder answered in his last interview to Dieter Schidor, "the topic is the identity of everyone and how he gets it" (Robert Fischer, Fassbinder Über Fassbinder, Berlin 2004, p. 621). Querelle, therefore, depicts an Utopian new world, the word "Utopian" having its proper sense, since: "the Brest, as described by Genet, it a totally invented one, it does not exist at all, except perhaps in a bar in Texas" (Fassbinder, Loc. Cit., p. 619). In "Der Bauer Von Babylon", directed by Schidor - a film that, broadcast only once by the German TV, should be put as a special on a new edition of "Querelle"! -, Fassbinder added that, for the first time in his career, he filmed the whole movie in the studio. Fassbinder's art director and Oscar-winner Rolf Zehetbauer had crated a wholly artificial and artistic environment, a ship-like island with the bar in the center. The question why Fassbinder did not decide for any real landscape, he answered: "Because every real environment has something holy". It turns out that what is holy is not holy because it is untouched or untouchable, but it is holy because it bears traces of others who have left them in this particular place, building, table (so-to-say relics, as in the Catholic church). Hence, in a last consequence of Fassbinder's idea, if you choose any establishment to open your set, it always also transports the memories of all those who had been there before. If you walk through the alleys of Vienna - auteur and Nobelpreis-nominee Heimito Von Doderer remarked -, you breathe the smell of the centuries that are in the walls and under the streets. (In this way, metaphysics of everyday-life is born.) Which place you ever choose for your film, it has this "inherited defect" of been metaphysically immersed. The holy is that which bears the traces and therefore will never be yours alone, yet you will never be alone either, if you chose to reside in such places. On the other side, the profane is the untouched, it is profane because it does not bear any traces and thus will not connect you and the centuries past into a "holy" cosmos of memories which only establish you as a part of history, the common history namely of you and the place of your destination. Therefore, it does not astonish that all apocalyptic scenes in Fassbinder's work (e.g. the 14th part of "Berlin Alexanderplatz") are places, where the traces (signs by their very nature) come back to live like it is said to be happen on doomsday. For his "Epilog" to "Alexanderplatz", Fassbinder even had a gigantic cemetery constructed on the set in Geiselgasteig, where the graves open after Biberkopf enters this street, known to him well from his former life, but whose traces he never had seen before. Now they manifest themselves and dance a dance macabre with him as their center.
MisterWhiplash
Rainer Werner Fassbinder once said that his oeuvre should be considered like that of a house, some parts are staircases and walls, other parts plumbing, but it should be considered a sturdy house. It's a good analogy, and for his (regrettably) final feature, Querelle, I suggest it's the sauna- a sauna lit with gaudy orange-yellows and loaded with overly serious homosexual theater patrons with occasional guest stars who should be in better rooms like Jeanne Moreau and Franco Nero. It ends up being some fun being in the room, but for completely all the wrong reasons. And, indeed, you may be totally befuddled by the look and feel of the sauna, with its stultifying heat making one feel, ultimately, more dull than dramatically engaged. It was also created in those final days of Fassbinder's, as a bloated coke-head who just earlier that year burned through one of his very best productions (Veronika Voss) only to, finally, burn out completely.Maybe Neil Young was wrong in his song, about the burn vs. rust, though in Fassbinder's case it was the only way. One can't help but see the passion in the project, an overtly theatrical and artificial film that has the subtitle "A Film About Jean Genet's Querelle". Genet, of course, was a scandalous poet/playwright in France, and he's inspired a few movies in his time. With this one, Fassbinder takes the sort of tactic Godard did in his later years- the lesser ones, arguably- as a blend develops between title cards, "authoritative" narration not too unlike the sort in Little Children, and an actual (if not very coherent) narrative of a sailor, Querelle, who gets gay sex for the first time, kills his opium dealer, gets embroiled in a mystery involving his boss, and somehow Jeanne Moreau's bar owner keeps an eye over everything more or less in-between her repeated song she sings.That, at least, is as much as I could figure. I really did want to give this a fair shot. I had read some negative reviews, but as well I read Marcel Carne's praise at the Venice film festival, that it would have a place in the HISTORY of CINEMA- in BOLD no less. And it's not even the homosexuality on display in and of itself that is a deterrent. It's the way Fassbinder goes about it; everything is so *serious*, so much without a hint of humor, that for a while I ended up straining to keep my eyes open. Brad Davis, and I'm not exaggerating in this description, is absolutely atrocious. He attempts to 'emote', but is so stilted and without any real trace of actual human sensitivity or connection to the other actors that he's like a slab of SPAM. Others like Gunther Kaufmann (in give or take a dozen Fassbinders) and the aforementioned Moreau and Nero are basically left to fend for their own devices... which aren't many, even with the oddly hypnotic Moreau.Ultimately, however, the film started to turn into something I didn't expect: camp. Oh man, is this a hoot of an art-house movie! There is a point, about two-thirds of the way through the running time, that the onslaught of completely useless narration- yeah, we get it, it's "about" the play, but why should we care the descriptions if we don't care about the actual empty-ass character- and deranged poetry of the title cards gets too much on top of the already inane, dead-pan dialog. I'm actually surprised this hasn't screened as a midnight movie from time to time in New York city, a movie that gay and straight can embrace as a film that is funnier and more ironically quotable than the trashiest melodrama Fassbinder couldn't have tried to concoct of his best day.Yes, Querelle is shot with a painterly eye, and yes its DoP Schwarzenberger provides a few stunning compositions, and then the rest of the time it's just... a dying fish of a movie. It's tail keeps flapping around and making movements, and it's a shame to realize that it will soon die by the end of the movie - and be the end of one of the most remarkable careers in modern cinema. Disappointment is putting it lightly.
jaibo
What an absolute peerless masterpiece this is. A glorious and sensual dream about subjectivity, objectification, image-making, masculinity and the disavowal from the male world of the abject female traits. But these traits cannot be disavowed, because all power needs fascination and fascination requires abjection.The film traces Querelle's journey from rigid singularity through an induction into a masculine world to an abject melting into the arms of the weakest of male figures. Seblon, excluded voyeur and viewer of Querelle's story is actually Querelle's final resting place - as we all finally rest before the images which dazzle us.An extremely ambiguous film, intricately bound within the image matrix it critiques - a weird and wonderful, fascinating world of mirrors, where all fall in love with their own idealised reflection & "each man kills the thing he loves." Certainly one of the most complex, provocative and seductive films of all time.
edthewalleyedhyena
Perhaps 'Querelle' is a film that demands a more cultured and broad-minded viewer than I have proved myself to be, or perhaps it is pure enigmatic, overwrought drivel. I will likely never know the absolute answer to that, but I am willing to bet that past and future viewers will fall into these two groups: Those who feel that unclear character motivations, loosely constructed plot-structure and melodramatically poetic theatrics bespeak a larger sentiment, one not blatantly stated in this film; And the second group, who will leave this viewing experience raising their eye-brows in confusion, and possibly having a good laugh.This film, though wordy, probably operates most effectively in its nonverbal trappings. The sets have a bourgeois richness that is almost tactile, the direction of movement is staged and coordinated like dance in some scenes, and the lighting is one of the best uses of expressionism out side of the American film noir idiom I've ever seen.The script is an abstract exploration of people's motivations, specifically as they relate to the more carnal side of love, and there is also an underlying, equally abstract, message about the methods and means of self-exploration. All of this is told from the unique perspective of a naive, amoral young man who is, at the time that this film is set, exploring and learning about himself largely through acts of violence, sex and betrayal. Brad Davis' acting in the lead role is a strange mixture of stoic detach and reined-in anger/passion and I can not begin to describe it to someone who has not seen the film.This film, in my opinion, can not escape the onus of its "high camp factor", One gets the feeling that this is the stuff that John Waters may have cackled at in his formative years. This is not to say it's without artistic merit; it will make a glutton of your eyes with its decadent colours and rich set dressings. Chances are you will love it, or you will laugh at it, but you will surely remember having seen it.
