Blu-ray Review: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ‘Querelle’ on the Criterion Collection

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s whirlwind career of 40-plus movies made within just over a dozen years kicked off with Love Is Colder Than Death. It ended, all too soon, with a sendoff that may as well have been called Death Is Hotter Than Love. Even if it hadn’t wound up being Fassbinder’s final cinematic will and testament, Querelle, an uber-horny but otherwise unorthodox adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest, would still feel like a film precariously perched between (no, make that robustly straddling) rowdy, profane life and that liminal, insatiable zone that always follows la petite mort.

But because the timeline spanning the film’s completion to its release was bisected by Fassbinder’s death from a drug overdose, it’s nearly impossible to avoid overlaying the gorgeously wrecked glamour of his entire career onto the film, draping the virtue of his carnal vices over a package that’s already prodigiously overstuffed. Reviewers of its era almost uniformly chickened out. But, as with William Friedkin’s contemporaneous olive hanky/left pocket masterpiece Cruising, time has proven a tender lover indeed to Querelle, proving nothing in LGBTQ+ cinema ages quite so fine as rough trade.

It doesn’t hurt that, in Brad Davis (brother of Gene Davis, who coincidentally portrayed Cruising’s cop-drag police informant), Fassbinder stumbled upon a muse to rival Marlene Dietrich to Josef von Sternberg, Monica Vitti to Michelangelo Antonioni, or, indeed, Hanna Schygulla to Fassbinder. Playing the eponymous role Querelle, a sailor making port (and then some) in Brest, France, Davis submits to Fassbinder’s gaze without a whiff of pretense or protest, posing languidly against the film’s highly artificial, phallic production design, but also quite actively filling out the overachievingly plunging neckline of his A-shirt.

If Tom of Finland took any cue from the prison cell in flagrante delictums of Un chant d’amour, his debt to Genet was paid back in full in just the shot of Davis’s Querelle lounging up-deck after a long shift of shoveling coal, his wet skin smeared by soot. “You look beautiful like this,” his perpetually staring commander (and audience surrogate) Lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero) says, to which Querelle all but affirms when he replies, “Yes, I do,” with a cigarette-dragging smirk.

If you’ll note I haven’t discussed much about the movie’s plot yet, that’s by design. As noted by Slant’s own Ed Gonzalez, for our list of the 100 Best LGBTQ Films of All Time, “Fassbinder’s style is one of multitudes, at once dreamlike and nightmarish, rigorous yet fluid, suggesting a memory being willed into beautiful being before its maker takes his last breath.” In other words, incident is merely transitory here. Only murderous lust endures, at any hour of the day (though it’s perpetually sunset) and from any set of steely eyes. Only Brest’s sole female denizen, barmaid Madame Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), rides above the fray, albeit fully enjoying the view as her men in her purview go toe-to-toe and incongruously play video games.

Beyond every man (to borrow from the movie’s Razzie-nominated song) indeed killing the thing he loves or at least trying to, Fassbinder’s film is far more preoccupied with positioning its band of priapic misfits, scoundrels, and criminals in bi-curious chiaroscuro. Through it all, Querelle volleys from misadventure to misdemeanor, fulfilling his creators’ aroused requirement that he read both profligate and naïf simultaneously, hero and antihero, the embodiment of the moment when your sex partner becomes your one and everything.

It’s a dazzling high-wire act, from both Fassbinder and Davis, and at no point does either party falter or even bluff. Ultimately, it’s hard to think of another director who so unapologetically laid bare the self-defeating flameout of masc-4-masc homosexual desire as Fassbinder did with Querelle, and who in retrospect so unsurprisingly had one foot already in the grave.

Image/Sound

At this point, the Criterion Collection’s monthly release schedules typically feature more titles on 4K UHD than not, so Querelle being relegated to Blu-ray only says more or less what you need to know about the transfer. Restored via 35mm interpositive, the image looks quite good, and the color palette is appropriately jaundiced. Shot by cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger, the film was ahead of the curve when it come to the teal-and-orange cliché, and Criterion’s high-definition transfer allows the characters to properly bathe in the film’s vacillation between pre- and afterglow. The source material comes with more than its share of pitfalls, including the deliberate warping and hazy focus from within the Cinemascopic frame. But the presentation here appears faithful to both the film’s grime and its glamour. The monaural sound is subtle but clear, and Peer Raben’s pitch-shifting choral drones float in and out of the mix with exactly the correct level of dreamlike impermanence as the film requires.

Extras

Forget Female Trouble and Bound. Criterion’s decision to release Querelle during Pride Month is as ballsy a move as they’ve ever made on behalf of finnicky LGBTQ+ cinephiles. That said, they stopped well short of unleashing the full parade when it comes to bonus features.

Thankfully, among the few things that Criterion did do was to recruit Reverse Shot’s Michael Koresky to weigh in with a characteristically perceptive assessment of Querelle’s position in the evolution of Fassbinder’s stylistic signature, using a quintet of films to serve as signposts. Working from the French New Wave lifts of Love Is Colder Than Death to the Sirk-infused empathy of Fear Eats the Soul to the jagged brutality of In a Year of 13 Moons, Koresky’s history of Fassbinder’s style cunningly keeps the director’s sexuality in focus throughout, thereby positioning Querelle as an appropriate apotheosis of its maker’s career arc.

There’s also an hour-long documentary look at Fassbinder’s last months, burning the candle at both ends with a starring role in Wolf Gremm’s Kamikaze ’89 at the same time as he was helming Querelle. Finally, there’s a note-perfect booklet essay by critic Nathan Lee, whose plunge straight into the erogenous heart of the film positions him as the devil perched on the opposite shoulder from the more academic approach offered up by Koresky’s angel.

Overall

Pride is many things, but this year it’s mostly the cut of Brad Davis’s muscle shirt cradling his cleavage like no piece of cloth has this side of Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski.