In this article I argue that “disorientation” indeed functions as the primary aesthetic mode in which the film operates, permeating visual style, narrative strategy, sound editing, audience response, and even critical reaction to Fassbinder’s final film. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s cinematic adaptation of Querelle embraces and reflects this sense of disorientation in a variety of ways, some of them perhaps unintentional.

Instead of feeling destroyed or reborn or cleansed, instead of feeling simply disgusted or turned on (though it is clear that there is some pleasure in this for Genet’s criminal), Querelle’s primary reaction is confusion and disorientation. A little higher up on the cover he softly buried his head with its strangely disordered black curls, untied and lifeless like the grass on an upturned clump of turf. Hardly able to formulate the reason for it: ‘Is that what it’s like, being a real fairy?’ he thought. Instead, he is alarmed to find himself reacting somewhat differently. Throughout passages preceding the event, Nono is referred to as “the executioner” and Querelle as “the murderer.” Despite Querelle’s fears of being “transformed” into a “fairy,” though, he holds onto “the comforting certainty that the execution would wash him clean of the murder” (70). When the titular hero of Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest allows himself to be fucked for the first time by Nono, the owner of the near-legendary brothel La Feria, he intends it as a sort of self-punishment, a metaphorical death that will allow him to be purged of guilt for his recent murder of a friend and fellow opium smuggler.

“Why is Fassbinder allowed this aesthetic duplicity in the melodramas but not in Querelle ?”

Querelle jean genet