Querelle is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film -- It is highly experimental, and probably should not be a viewer's first experience with a Fassbinder film -- It has a fever-dream quality -- It is entirely played on a stage set, the artificiality of which enhances the film's surrealality -- The actors mostly deliver their lines deadpan -- The film is not without flaws (it is, after all "experimental") -- But in spite of them, I think it the best Fassbinder film I've viewed (perhaps even better than Whity)--
The film derives from Jean Genet's book Querelle de Brest (said both to be extraordinary and equally lurid, and which I have not read) -- As Fassbinder himself said, it is not an adaptation of, but "about" the book (whatever that means) --