Querelle (Critical Condition)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Producer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenwriter: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematographer: Xaver Schwarzenberger
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s iconic final film is a ravishing adaptation of Jean Genet’s homoerotic classic about a deadly sailor on shore leave.
The swan song for New German Cinema’s enfant terrible, this dreamlike adaptation of Genet’s seminal novel Querelle of Brest unfolds in a highly stylised, wonderfully phallic French port. There, the titular beefcake sailor (Brad Davis, Chariots of Fire) decamps to a bar run by Madame Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau, Jules et Jim) and becomes embroiled in opium dealing, sex and murder. All the while, his superior, the lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero), lurks and lusts after him.
Released in 1982 in the wake of Fassbinder’s untimely death, aged just 37, Querelle was quite unlike anything the director had made before. The film divided critics (the New York Times called it “a mess”), while two of its songs, including Moreau’s Oscar Wilde–riffing chanson ‘Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves’, were disgracefully nominated for Razzies. But this sui generis work that once existed as a seedy outlier on Fassbinder’s acclaimed résumé has since emerged as one of his key works, admired for its bold, expressionistic design and lurid, ravishing homoeroticism.
“Fassbinder invents a complex, voluptuous expressionism … His final act as an artist was to immortalize Genet on film with greater force than Genet himself.” – The Village Voice
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This screening will be introduced by film critic Guy Lodge (Variety), and a panel discussion will follow the film.
Guy Lodge is the UK film critic for industry bible Variety, a columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, and editor of the review site Film of the Week. Born and raised in South Africa, he now lives in London.
Michael Koresky is editorial director at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, where he also serves as editor of the film journal Reverse Shot; a freelance programmer and host for The Criterion Channel; and author of the books Films of Endearment and Terence Davies.
Rebecca Harkins-Cross is a nonfiction writer and cultural critic based in Naarm/Melbourne, whose work has been published widely in journals and periodicals across Australia and the world. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne, after receiving her doctorate from Monash University in 2023 and completing a Fulbright Fellowship at Columbia University’s Writing Program in 2022. Her debut book, The Headless Woman, is forthcoming with Fireflies Press as part of the Decadent Editions series.