‘Querelle’: Fassbinder’s Defiant Swan Song

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film, “Querelle,” released posthumously in 1982, was the most lavish and artificial of the 40-odd movies the prolific filmmaker directed over the course of a 13-year career.

A film that recapitulates even as it embalms many of Fassbinder’s concerns, “Querelle” screens in a new digital version for a week starting Friday at Anthology Film Archives.

At once lurid and static, a funerary frieze of power plays, treachery and weaponized sex, “Querelle” is faithful to Jean Genet’s sensuous prose-poem novel in tracking the criminal and erotic escapades of the title character, a charismatic young sailor (Brad Davis).

Universally desired, Querelle is a killer, a masochist, a smuggler, a stool pigeon, and a participant in a convoluted daisy chain. His brother Robert (Hanno Pöschl) is sleeping with Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), the madam of a waterfront bordello; Querelle, who allows himself to be sexually used by Lysiane’s husband, Nono (the Fassbinder regular Günther Kaufmann), has sex with her as well. He also seduces (or at least vamps) and frames a good-hearted Polish sailor (Pöschl again) and, throughout the movie, is cruised by his ship’s repressed lieutenant (Franco Nero).

This tawdry rondo is frequently accompanied by a celestial chorus and bathed in a golden light, with Davis individually glorified. (Beautiful and inert, he might be a stand-in for Rock Hudson, who was not only closeted but the favorite actor of Fassbinder’s favorite director, Douglas Sirk.) Moreau, virtually the only woman in the film, comments on the turgid delirium by twice singing a ditty taken from Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” in which the phrase “each man kills the thing he loves” is followed by a jaunty “dadada-dadada.”