20 AUGUST 1983, Page 23

Arts

The sailors' lament

Peter Ackroyd

Querelle ('I8', Screen on the Hill)

Exciting news, last spring, that there were long queues of Parisians waiting to see this film; bars with names like Le Stud and Le Vagabond empty every night; no one had seen so much leather and jewellery since the last collections. Rumours that Querelle was not to be given a cer- tificate in this country caused consterna- tion: how dare they? It is not difficult to see what the fuss was about. The director of the film, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, had only recently succumbed to a fatal overdose of drugs, and there is nothing like an untimely death to give a cachet to a film. It was, in addition, based upon a novel by Jean Genet, the eminence mauve of French literature, the man who wanted to become a martyr but was transformed into a saint: fate can be cruel. Since his novel has something to do with sailors and, to use a. nautical expression, 'rum, bum and 'baccy', it was no Wonder that half Europe wanted to see it.

I do not expect that many of them wanted to see it twice, however, unless out of some stubborn but fruitless curiosity to discover what it was about. Here is the pot- ted version: Querelle, a sailor, upon whom to look is to fall in love, is pursued by a French lieutenant who certainly does not want a woman. The lieutenant whispers his love into a tape recorder, the only piece of \ equipment he can gel his hands on. Querelle meanwhile kills another sailor, and is promptly sodomised by the owner of the local bar. In fact there is a great deal of buggery throughout the film — the men take down their trousers with a monotonous regularity only previously seen in Whitehall farces. An elderly chanteuse (played by Jeanne Moreau) appears from time to time with an expression of pained astonishment at the fact that no one loves her. Since she is surrounded by more fag- gots than Joan of Arc, it is clear that a lifetime of cheap gin has left her fatally short-sighted.

The only virtue of the film is that it looks good: the interiors are satisfyingly murky, as if the whole thing has been shot in the deep end of a swimming pool. Fassbinder has created a desperate and ruined city, the fantasist's version of an extended urinal, where the walls are crumbling, the rooms decayed, the alleys damp and sad. The sky is illuminated by an artificial glow, as if God had decided that only a red light would suit the district — to adapt a once popular lyric, a paper sun sails over a cardboard sea and, as a result, the film itself has the histrionic and deliberately artificial tone of an operetta or perhaps a charade.

Fassbinder has always been adept at visual composition — there are few direc- tors who are able to light a scene as well as he could — but in this case the spectacle depends so much upon a deliberate hollow- ness to create its effects that its fragile sense of illusion cannot be sustained for long. But perhaps the hollowness is not as deliberate as it seemed: Fassbinder seems to have a sweet-counter where his imagination should be, so that the pretty pictures have the lurid colours of a gay chocolate box cover. This has a truly numbing effect when it is com- pounded with his Germanic attitude towards sex, which is treated here with a characteristically dour thoroughness.

Fassbinder is not prompted to better things by the literary presence of Genet who, in this translation at least (the film has English sub-titles), reads like the Barbara Cartland of homosexuality. No one with a sense of humour can remain unmoved by lines such as, 'Having suffered my lonely strangeness for long enough ... I swim in tenderness for these boys ... A dangerous sadness draws me towards you ... how his body glows in the glory of his movements ... black makes you unbearably exciting ...'. The excitement is not shared.

Such a whimsical tone might suit the ramblings of an onanist gasping for breath, but not anything else. It is the merest cliche that the fantasies of others are rarely interesting but, more importantly, they are not in any case a commodity that can easily be packaged for general consumption. And Querelle himself, a supposedly angelic figure touched by the glow of other men's desires, is hardly likely to be embodied in the somewhat stolid shape and features of the American actor Brad Davis. Fortunate- ly, Mr Davis does not have to act: he simply looks pained, for what reason I of course cannot say, and leans against posts when it is all over. Jeanne Moreau is also wasted here: since she is the only woman in the film, as far as one can tell, she might have expected a starring role of her own but here she is dressed up to resemble a drag queen. And, when she sings an updated version of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, she sounds like one also.

Querelle is thematically banal, relying upon a familiar mixture of sex and violence which is here conflated by quasi-religious yearnings: there is nothing like a sense of damnation, after all, to lend significance to vice. But psychologically it is also extremely maladroit, since the theoretically interesting question of Querelle's narcissism is here overlaid by a sententious romanticism. And so we have a French novelist caricatured by a German fantasist: we get the worst of both worlds, the cinematic equivalent of an EEC butter mountain which has turned rancid in the heat. Bad though it is, it is still a curiosity however: if you dare to laugh in the intellectual milieu of Hampstead and Belsize Park, where the film is now being shown, you might want to watch the first half hour or so.