Plays like the apocalypse. Fassbinder’s final film. Expressionist character sexual safari. The thought of murder often evokes thoughts of the sea and sailors. Querelle (1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is part entry into the filthy uninhibited sex drive of one man part processing his psychology his feelings his desires. These aren’t to be reconciled. The accounting isn’t neat or tidy. But volatile. Impulsive. Esoteric. Personal. Individual.
I wanna say Querelle seems to constantly attempt constructing his own identity based on other men around him. Finding someone like you. The search to connect contrasted with masculine passivity. As a character he embodies freedom. His attitude confidence sly guile wily provocative defiantly content with himself on the outside. Tempestuous interior.
His perpetuating cycle of enacting his own destruction as both means and end is the end of the world. Revelations. Or atonement once again? Or both? Fighting his brother is fighting himself and he has no brother.
How cool is it that we get a return to the offputting wooden line readings with languorous pauses as characters look of into the distance their eyeline nowhere aimed at the character they’re talking to? And Xaver Schwarzenberger’s full on artificial color palette throughout the entirety of the film’s runtime? Amazing. Candy corn sky as source casting molten movie popcorn butter hue over all. Blue silver accents.
Drone. Chanting. The air of a funeral elegy. Exalted mourning. All with the dispassionate disaffected defiance of a singular voice the likes of which we’ll never see again.
His perpetuating cycle of enacting his own destruction as both means and end is the end of the world. Revelations. Or atonement once again? Or both? Fighting his brother is fighting himself and he has no brother.
How cool is it that we get a return to the offputting wooden line readings with languorous pauses as characters look of into the distance their eyeline nowhere aimed at the character they’re talking to? And Xaver Schwarzenberger’s full on artificial color palette throughout the entirety of the film’s runtime? Amazing. Candy corn sky as source casting molten movie popcorn butter hue over all. Blue silver accents.
Drone. Chanting. The air of a funeral elegy. Exalted mourning. All with the dispassionate disaffected defiance of a singular voice the likes of which we’ll never see again.
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