Querelle

Querelle (1982) is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film — watch online on iFILM and you'll see him pushing his own cinema to its furthest point. Brad Davis plays Querelle, a sailor who docks in Brest carrying a shipment of heroin and a complete indifference to consequence. The port's famous brothel pulls him in: there's a ritual here — you roll dice with the owner, and whoever loses has to sleep with him. Querelle loses deliberately.

The film makes no attempt at realism. Fassbinder shot on artificial studio sets — crimson skies, flat painted backdrops, a Brest that looks more like a fever dream than a French port. He was adapting Jean Genet's 1947 novel, and he kept Genet's logic: lust, murder and betrayal aren't psychology here, they're mythology. Jeanne Moreau narrates and sings at the edges of the frame. Franco Nero plays the police lieutenant drawn toward Querelle from the other side of the law.

Released months after Fassbinder died of an overdose at 37, Querelle is the most uncompromising thing in a career already full of uncompromising films. Stream Querelle online on iFILM.