Kritiken

Frankly erotic and garishly artificial, shot on horizonless soundstages and bathed in orange and blue filtered light, it is both ridiculous and sublime.

Querelle is often regarded as somewhat of an anomalous and disappointing finale [to Fassbinder's career]. However, an understanding and re-valuing of Fassbinder's betrayals of Genet's novel, audience sensibilities, Gay Liberation politics, genre boundaries and film conventions (particularly white light) can lead to an appreciation of its cultural and aesthetic value and restore our faith in Fassbinder's concluding contribution to cinema.

After putting off watching it for many years, I was surprised by how fresh and genuinely funny it is. More than anything, Querelle is a sui generis work that doesn't clearly point toward "what could've been" had Fassbinder lived, but rather it's yet another tantalizing one-off experiment, like so much of the director's work, which plays upon themes and aesthetic strategies from Satan's Brew, Effi Briest, and Veronika Voss (to name only a few).

Undoubtedly Fassbinder’s gayest picture... In its dis-ease [Querelle] hits on a level outside of social commentary, but that’s not to say Fassbinder isn’t saying a whole lot in this dark, sweaty spectacle.

Fassbinder’s brilliant and controversial idea to set the film in a fake set paid off, and it is testament to his talent as a film director that despite the stagey production design, the picture still feels extremely cinematic, thanks to the elegant and fluid camera work, and deep, vibrant colours.

More a dream about than a dramatisation of Genet's novel, this is glorious and infuriating in equal parts... [The film's] narrative detachment, weighty monologues, Resnais-like anachronisms, and (most irritating of all) listless rationale turn it into a lurid hymn to teenybop nihilism.

A bold cinematic renewal by way of an exalted tangle of sex and violence... The teeming cast of characters fight for power and pleasure while decked out in whimsical costumes and lit in garish colors amid ornate décor; the film's literary roots show through in florid voice-overs and intertitles. Fassbinder's heightened, brazen modernity points to new and influential paths that he didn't live to take.

Querelle is a smorgasbord of surreal sets, textured use of sound and vision. It is determinedly experimental in its forceful way of manipulating an audience into thinking about a subject more deeply. Cineastes should delight in the opportunity to behold the work of a pioneer,

No one’s come closer to Genet’s lush phantasmagoria [than Fassbinder]. [The director] invents a complex, voluptuous expressionism to honor [the writer's] text... [Fassbinder] confronts such radioactive lyricism head-on, banishing all pretense to objective realism... His final act as an artist was to immortalize Genet on film with greater force than Genet himself.

Querelle is, contrivedly and appropriately enough, the perfect film of a ventriloquist’s dummy, a somnambulist, a soon-to-be-dead man. One can find the film (as many have already testified) moving, arousing, beautiful, engaging – but it’s a studiously vacuous and kitschy kind of emotional effect that it works hard to produce, a pure glittering aesthetic long finished with any consideration of an ethic or politic.

[Querelle] is one of the riskiest films Fassbinder ever made, the result of hundreds of bold choices, some of them intelligent, but almost all of them wrong.