killing one softly with love
by
Douglas Messerli
Rainer
Werner Fassbinder and Burkhard Driest (screenplay, based on the novel by Jean
Genet), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Querelle / 1982
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, 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?
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.
Los Angeles, June
12, 2017
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