The fact that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was not able to celebrate his 75th birthday this year is because his fast-paced, alohol and cocaine fuelled lifestyle put him in an early grave in 1982, when he was only 37 years old. The extravagant, intentionally unrealistic Querelle unintentionally became his cinematic testament.
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‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ This is the one-liner with which Rainer Werner Fassbinder put paid to any further discussion with people who wondered who he managed to make forty-four films, including the 14-hour-long TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz, between 1966 and 1982, while also spending every night and day indulging in sex, art, drink, cocaine, and other of life’s delights.
The extravagant, intentionally unrealistic Querelle unintentionally became his cinematic testament. The ingenious enfant terrible of post-war German cinema found his inspiration in a controversial novel that the French playwright Jean Genet had started writing while he was in gaol. In a hallucinogenic, orange underworld of the French port city Brest, a horny, murderous, manipulative sailor (the American Brad Davis) discovers his ambiguous sexual identity. He intentionally loses at dice so that instead of sleeping with a brothel manager who yearns for passion and enjoys singing “Each man kills the thing he loves” (the legendary Jeanne Moreau, oui, oui), he sleeps with her gambling-addicted, untrustworthy husband.
All kinds of bodily fluids flow copiously, leather is there to be stained, and the exorbitant décor is almost hilariously phallic. The sultry homoeroticism and the lively promiscuity shocked the petit bourgeois press and audiences when it was released. It is decadent, bizarre, and bathetic, even by Fassbender’s standards. So maybe it’s exactly what you need.
QUERELLE
DE, FR, dir.: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, act.: Brad Davis, Jeanne Moreau, Franco Nero
21 > 25/10, Flagey, www.cinematek.be
Read more about: Film , Rainer Werner Fassbinder
