Roxy Reelness: Querelle

Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is a deliriously stylized tale of hothouse lust and simmering violence. Set amid an expressionistic soundstage vision of a French sea port, this daring adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet recounts the tragedy of a handsome sailor (Brad Davis) as he is drawn into a vortex of sibling rivalry, murder, and explosive sexuality. Completed just before Fassbinder’s sudden death at age thirty-seven, QUERELLE finds the director pushing his embrace of artifice and taboo-shattering depiction of queer desire to new extremes.