Funniest Film I've Seen This Year!

Jean Genet's novel was published in 1947. He uses very crude language in a super-artistique way. To say that the novel is a period piece does not beguin to address the richness of its existential analysis.

In Genet's view, homosexuals are repressed psychotics whose sexuality is laden with disturbing submissive/dominant elements. And heterosexuals are the same, only much, much worse.

Fassbinder was not the man to resist such possibilities for surrealist Kitsch. He was not interested in American suburban gays living healthy, monogamous, bourgeois lives in neat subdivision housing with modern, well-stocked kitchens full of high tech appliances. He was interested in repressed psychotics whose sexuality is laden with disturbing submissive/dominant elements.

His cinematography was not meant to be improving or inspiring or affirmative or life-positive. You may be amused by this film, but I doubt that you've understood much about it.




If the Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard, It can also be like a chicken-pox mark.

You've missed the pont of them film.
You can't view it or even think of it as a comedy. It is in no way a comedy, and to think it's funny suggest....well....lack of experience watching art films (to say the least).

I do agree that certain elements of the film are intentionally humourous (all of Fassbinder's film contain various types of intentional humour and irony), but there was nothing humourous about watching Franco Nero portray a homosexual man suppressing his love for another man. I quickly forgot I was watching Camelot Lancelot, and instead felt strong waves of sympathy and despair for the Captain.

The set pieces and overall ambiance are also reminiscent of early stagings of plays penned by Tennessee Williams and Bertolt Brecht, and there is a thematic parallel to Melville's Billy Budd as well.

The coarseness of the profanity was 100% intentional and effective and essential and thematic and Shakespearean. Also, the language of the book is quite elaborate, immaculately sculpted sentences, erotically descriptive, religious references and allegory, and existentalist; Fassbinder brilliantly stylized and iconographized the visuals and acting to represent Genet's tapestry of language.

In the end, it has not aged well.

Au contraire, it has not only aged well, Querelle is the most realistic and relevant and modern and thus far greatest, homosexual-themed filmed ever crafted. Cinéma vérité at its finest.

Of course that is just an opinion, but with the exception of My Own Private Idaho, I have never before watched a gay-themed film that was as seriously realistic and powerfully explorative as Querrele. Querelle was ahead of its time.

This seems like it just perpetuates the played out stereotype of homosexuals as repressed psychotics

A plot device to keep people interested in watching.

These people were human stars trailing fire, their dewy tears pearled into blood drops, livid flames searching to quench their unfulfilled desires.

Fassbinder, like Shakespeare, gave the lumpenproletariat a complex three-dimensional voice and conscious.

Fassbinder was exploring what it meant for a man to sexually desire the essence of another man, another man's body, another man's mind. He was exploring what it meant to love and desire another human being regardless of gender, and what love and desire entailed (it entails betrayal and deception as much as it entails honesty and monogamy). Fassbinder was proving that same-sex binding transcended homosexuality - the sexual orientation and all the stereotypes. Fassbinder was illustrating that the search for identity started with the physical body.