Rating: 4.5/5
Querelle is a chaotic bisexual who gets off on stealing, murdering, and seducing guys to do his bidding. But that’s barely what this movie is
By all measures, this is a bad movie, and intentionally so. Artificial lights and unsubtle sets frame poorly performed soliloquies by good actors and erotic dialogue written like a schoolboy. Also, the laziest song about men killing what they love
The movie regularly breaks off to ethereal music and black text on white — maybe snippets from the book — that only obscure the image of Querelle further. Similarly, a voiceover shows up from time to time, and it never adds anything to the scene
Even the subtitles just cut to [inaudible] throughout, when it isn’t that hard to understand what the actors are saying
I see this the same way I see Spike Jonze’s Adaptation — it’s a screenwriter and director who don’t want to adapt the book they’ve been given, so they technically adapt it but with their twist. It’s a deconstruction of what a movie is allowed to do
Also, Fassbinder was doing a metric ton of coke, if that isn’t obvious
Of course, I love this