REVIEWED
“Nono would like you, your a cute chicken.”
- Querelle (Brad Davis)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final movie 'Querelle' is like popping open the amyl nitrate & Vaseline and being thrown head first into a live action Tom-of-Finland caricature. Its a bawdy homoerotic stage-like tale of sailor Querelle. While on shore leave he abandons his Catholic shackles and his sexual inhibitions, and in order to earn some quick money gets himself caught up in a series of petty crimes that lead to a set of homocides.
Failing to find any sources for Jeanne Moreau's Demoniac '57 & Hu-Man '75 (both possibly now lost), I plumped to end a mini run of her movies with this. It helped that it had also been on my watchlist here for ages & was an opportunity to tick another Fassbinder flick off his to see list. Moreau plays Lysiane the aging moody, singing manageress of a brothel, and wife to blatant homosexual Nono. Shes equal parts faghag & mirror of femininity to the gay clientèle. Brad Davis is perfect as homomasculine protagonist Querelle, he was such a powerhouse and diverse actor that sadly died way ahead of his time.
Admittedly homoerotica is sorta wasted on a boringly straight guy like myself, so I watched the movie with the same strange detachment I usually reserve for musicals, Bollywood and Adam Sandler romcoms'. But Fassbinders movies are always visually arresting, this being no exception. If you need to see a pink cinema movie, you'd be hard pushed to find one more lush looking than this. Sadly like Davis, RWF was another extremely talented guy, the arts lost far too soon.
[Personal Reasons For Remembering]
Was that really Moreau in the pornographic pictures the inspector was flicking through towards the end of the movie ?
Originally taken from Letterboxd
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