Querelle

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film; he died at thirty-seven shortly after finishing it. The source is Jean Genet's 1947 novel Querelle de Brest. The subject is a sailor: Querelle comes ashore at Brest, smuggles drugs, commits a murder, and works through his own desire in the brothel by the port. Its most obvious quality is that it was built entirely in a studio. There is no sea and no real harbour; everything happens on sets painted in orange and blue light. The sky is permanently the colour of sunset and never changes. The result is deliberately far from realism, somewhere between theatre and dream. The narration works the same way: a voice from outside reads the text and the characters sometimes look straight into the camera. Brad Davis plays Querelle, Franco Nero an officer and Jeanne Moreau the woman who runs the brothel. It divided audiences on release and still does. An important work for anyone who values Fassbinder and formalist cinema. Before you watch, know this: it is explicitly sexual, it braids violence and desire together, and the narrative is made easy at no point.