killing
softly with love
Rainer Werner Fassbinder and
Burkhard Driest (screenplay, based on the novel by Jean Genet), Rainer Werner
Fassbinder (director) Querelle / 1982
Totally by coincidence, I watched
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle,
on the 33rd anniversary of his 1982 death by a drug overdose. I had been
putting off the viewing this film for a very long time, since, although I had
never seen the entire film, I had previewed long clips, and wasn’t particularly
pleased with what I saw. Yet, all the other Fassbinder films I had seen since
were absolutely wonderful in my estimation. Like The New York Times critic, Vincent Canby, given the passages I’d
observed, I was ready to declare his final work as a “mess,” a “detour” in the
work of an important European filmmaker. Canby, a great admirer of Fassbinder
films in general, found this work as a “humorless” and “witless” production.
I guess I needed to see 25 other films before I could tackle the
difficulties of this last work, released after Fassbinder’s death. Even in this
most recent viewing, I recalled what I didn’t like about the portions I had
previously viewed. Nobody in this film of exaggerated melodrama even pretends
to be “acting,” their lines delivered as if the figures were performing a campy
production on a high school stage, with sets designed by local cartoonists and
lit by a host of gay “queens” of the old school, who one can almost hear
shouting out to lighting crew: “rose red, deep-sea blue, meadowlark yellow,
lemongrass green!” The costumes, as some critics complained, seem to have been
stolen from the wardrobe of mediocre comic operettas of the 1930s. The plot
meanders back and forth through the original Genet work, Querelle de Brest, as if
the director had leafed through its pages, cut them out of the binding, and
threw them into the air before readapting them to film. The work’s two songs
was composed by the highly gifted Peer Raben, composer of many of Fassbinder’s
scores, both won Razzie Awards for the worst songs of the year. Of particular
disinterest is the corny rendition, sung by Jeanne Moreau, of the Oscar Wilde
lyrics from “The Ballad of Reading Goal,” ''Each man kills the thing he loves
... dahdee-dah-dee-dah.''
The questions the film version calls up are so numerous that one might
actually produce a small pamphlet listing them. “Why do the two brothers of
this work, Querelle (Brad Davis) and
Robert (Hanno Pöschl) so simultaneously hate and love one
another? Why does Querelle suddenly determine to kill his accomplice in a
cocaine deal, and yet, at the last moment, lick the blood from his breast? Why
does Querelle purposely loose his dice toss with Lysiane’s (Jeanne Moreau)
husband, Nono (Günther Kaufmann), allowing himself to be fucked by him? And,
given the situation, what do Lysiane and Nono see in one another, particularly
given the fact that Nono is apparently gay, and Lysiane heterosexual? And why,
given Querelle’s apparent love of gay sex, is
he even attracted to Lysiane?
Given a script that seems to have slipped out of Charles Ludlam’s
Ridiculous Theater’s repertory, does any of this matter? Despite Canby’s
serious-minded huffing, Fassbinder has actually created a quite comical send up
of Genet’s hothouse sex story, creating a kind of gay fantasia in which
everybody is desperate to fuck, suck, fight, rob, and kill one another. There
is not a single figure in this work who isn’t hounded by sexual obsession, and
the sweaty pretty boys of Fassbinder’s work are perfectly aware of their power,
posing against the film’s absurd phallic pillars like models from Pierre &
Gilles photographic paintings.*
Fassbinder, it is clear, has little interest in this film in plot or
even a coherent story, but is simply interested in creating a theatrically
charged stage to portray the passions of gay and bisexual love. No one else
need apply. Even Lysiane seems to be a kind of drag queen, while at the other
end, the closeted Lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero) pours his heart out to a tape
recorder, fantasizing himself in Querelle’s arms, a dream which, right out of
fairy tales, eventually comes true.
Expanding on the films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and
even Genet himself, Fassbinder bid farewell to realism in this film, and
moved instead to hyper-theatrical
world that attempted to speak to the gay sensibility, not to its reality. In a
sense, one can see the roots of this film in his earliest works such as Love Is Colder Than Death and The American Soldier where violence is
portrayed in terms that are closer to kabuki and reveal the sensual dance of
two males in each other’s arms. But by 1982, for Fassbinder, the dance had
perhaps less to do with actual passion than with the comic routines of Chaplin
and Keaton; love and death, always closely intertwined in Fassbinder’s vision,
had become non-emotional issues—almost formal gestures—at which one could
simply laugh, something that, to steal the lyrics of the Fox/Gimbel song sung
by Roberta Flack, “kills one softly with love.”
*Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard
are French gay artists who since 1976 have created numerous works of
photography and painting that represent purposely kitsch and exaggeratedly
romantic portraits of gay and heterosexual figures. I’ve posted one of their
works above.
Los Angeles, June 12, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).
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