Craig J. Clark
In its early years, the Golden Raspberry Awards strove to shadow the Academy Awards as much as possible. In addition to naming the prior year’s worst picture, director, screenplay, and recognizing all four acting categories, Razzies were also given out for Worst Musical Score and Worst Original Song. The score category was retired after just five years, but among the handful of films dinged in both was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle, which is part of the Criterion Channel’s “And the Razzie Goes to…” series despite going home empty-handed four decades back. (That was the year of The Lonely Lady, so composer Peer Raben and lyricist Jeanne Moreau had to content themselves with the dishonor of being nominated.)
At the time he shot Querelle in March 1982, Fassbinder was coming off two magnum opuses: the BRD Trilogy of The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss, and the 14-part miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz. The latter was the result of an extended, year-long production and was his most ambitious project since the “family series” Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, five movie-length episodes released over six months in 1972/73. That was followed by the two-part science fiction epic World on a Wire, which further demonstrated Fassbinder’s need to stretch himself and push his collaborators (on- and off-screen) to the point of exhaustion and beyond. Some burned out or sought opportunities elsewhere, but Fassbinder was the locomotive. If you wanted to work with him, you had to be prepared to hop aboard and hang on for dear life.
Of all the behind-the-scenes personnel who toiled on Querelle, the one with the longest track record was Peer Raben, who composed the music for nearly all of Fassbinder’s features, starting with his debut, Love Is Colder Than Death, in 1969. In addition to Querelle’s eclectic score, Raben also wrote the music for the Razzie-nominated songs “Each Man Kills the Thing He Love,” based on a poem by Oscar Wilde and sung by Jeanne Moreau, and “Young and Joyful Bandit,” which Moreau wrote the lyrics for, but did not sing. That fell to Günther Kaufmann, one of Fassbinder’s many former lovers and a fixture of his early features. The two parted ways after the 1971 western Whity (in which he also sang the theme song), but Kaufmann returned to the fold for 1978’s In a Year with 13 Moons and remained in the fold to the end.
In a way, the beginning of the end was Despair, which came right before 13 Moons and represented Fassbinder’s big swing for mainstream success outside of Germany. Filmed entirely in English – a first for him – from a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, Despair boasted a major international star in Dirk Bogarde and was his most expensive film to date. When it failed to recoup its costs, he regrouped with Maria Braun and worked his way back up to another shot at the brass ring. That was Lili Marleen, an even more expensive project (also made in English) he embarked upon right after Berlin Alexanderplatz. His third attempt was an adaptation of the Jean Genet novel Querelle de Brest starring Brad Davis of Midnight Express fame as the title character, an oft-shirtless sailor who turns the heads of everybody he meets and has a lucrative sideline in opium smuggling, along with the occasional murder to cover it up.
Much of the action takes place in and around the Hotel Feria Bar, a whorehouse owned by Kaufmann’s Nono and his wife Lysiane (Moreau), a cabaret singer whose current lover happens to be Querelle’s estranged brother Robert (Hanno Pöschl). Also in the mix is Querelle’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero), who is besotted with him and pours his thoughts into a Sony tape recorder since he can’t reveal his desires to their object. The hothouse atmosphere Fassbinder evokes is unlike anything he had put on film before, foregrounding the artificial nature of the studio-bound production. Like William Friedkin’s Cruising, which was nominated for three Razzies in its first year (and is also featured in Criterion’s series), it’s unafraid to put gay sexuality front and center, even at the expense of alienating potential homophobes in the audience. It’s tempting to think the Razzies chose not to nominate Fassbinder for Worst Director out of respect for the dead, but as respectfulness is not what they’re known for, it’s more likely there was simply too much competition that year.
With its brazenly phallic architecture and well-sculpted young men in Tom of Finland-inspired outfits, Querelle would go down as the most homoerotic film in history if Genet’s own Un chant d’amour didn’t exist. Knowing Fassbinder, he may have tried to top it were it not for his fatal drug overdose on June 10, 1982, two months before Querelle’s belated debut at the Montreal Film Festival. That was a warm-up for Venice, where it was in competition for the Golden Lion, but lost to Wim Wenders’s The State of Things. It was a very different result than the hat trick Fassbinder envisioned when he won Berlin’s Golden Bear in February with Veronika Voss. While Querelle was still being edited (a process that dragged on much longer than he was accustomed to, thanks to demands for heavy cuts from his American distributor), he expected to the take the Palme d’Or at Cannes with it and shoot his next project in time for it to compete and win at Venice. Not the first time Fassbinder’s ambitions got ahead of him, but it turned out to be the last.
“Querelle” can be found straddling the line between art and commerce on the Criterion Channel and Tubi.
