Editor’s Note: Some films can be known for their “excesses” — heavy on violence, or shock scenes, or non-stop action. Freeline Media critic Milan Paurich explores something else entirely: two classic films known for their homoerotic excesses. Read on!

By Milan Paurich

Fellini Satyricon, Querelle and the Cinema of Homoerotic Excess

Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1970) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1983) don’t merely depict worlds in which homosexuality is accepted, desired and openly practiced; they construct entire cinematic universes in which heterosexuality has been stripped of its customary privilege. In both films, male bodies, male desire, male beauty and male power dominate the frame with such flamboyant insistence that normative heterosexuality can seem like an intrusion. What makes them so extraordinary — and oddly companionable — is the way their homoeroticism is the very principle governing their mise-en-scène. They don’t simply depict worlds in which men desire men, they imagine worlds in which male bodies have become the chief currency of visual experience.

To watch them is to enter into the gay Disneyland of cinema: artificial universes in which every attraction, every decorative flourish, every turn in the road seems to have been conceived around some elaborately sublimated sexual fantasy. The environments are knowingly unreal, the bodies improbably beautiful or grotesque, the rituals heightened beyond ordinary behavior and the colors pushed toward delirium. They don’t just invite us to believe in their worlds, but to luxuriate in them. And if the air in these movies seems unusually thick, it’s because you can practically smell the amyl nitrite.

Although both possess an outrageous sense of humor about their excesses, the Disneyland equation isn’t intended as a joke. It’s simply a way of recognizing that their sexuality is inseparable from their artificiality. Satyricon and Querelle are hardly realistic depictions of gay life, nor could they be. They’re fantasy machines, elaborate erotic environments in which the ordinary rules governing gender, sexuality, beauty, violence, and propriety have been suspended. Fellini and Fassbinder turn cinema itself into a cruising space.

The resemblance between the two films is particularly striking because they arrive at their erotic deliriums by radically different historical and aesthetic routes. Fellini begins with Petronius (or the fragments of Petronius that were available to him) and imagines ancient Rome as a civilization already so alien to modern experience that he remakes it from scratch. Fassbinder adapts Jean Genet’s Querelle of Brest, a work of criminality, homosexuality, betrayal, and erotic obsession, and translates its impossible imagery into a theatrical soundstage. Both directors therefore arrive at the same paradox: the less realistic their worlds become, the more physically palpable its sexuality becomes.

That’s the true genius of Satyricon. The movie is ostensibly an excursion into antiquity, but Fellini has no interest in reconstructing ancient Rome according to the conventions of historical spectacle. His Rome isn’t the Rome of Ben-Hur or The Fall of the Roman Empire: it’s a hallucination of antiquity assembled from fragments, ruins, bodies, masks, painted faces, grotesque architecture, sexual appetites, ritual violence and dream logic. The effect is less historical reconstruction than extraterrestrial anthropology. Fellini’s ancient Rome looks less like a civilization reconstructed from archaeological evidence than one remembered by someone who’s never been there.

And because Satyricon is a hazily sci-fi-ish interpretation, sexuality can operate according to its own fantasy rules. Martin Potter and Hiram Keller’s Encolpius and Ascyltus aren’t conventionally heterosexual protagonists who happen to encounter homosexuality along the way. They’e young men whose sexual and emotional universe is fundamentally fluid. Their rivalry over Gitón (Max Born) gives the film something resembling a romantic triangle except that the triangle keeps changing its geometry. Desire is unstable; possession is temporary; bodies move from one person to another with the casualness of figures changing places in a dream.

The movie’s sexuality refuses the tidy categories heterosexual narrative cinema traditionally demands. Who’s the lover, rival and object? Who’s masculine or feminine? The answers are constantly shifting. Fellini’s camera seems delighted by the instability.

He gives us faces that look painted rather than born, bodies that resemble sculpture and sexual arrangements that have the ceremonious absurdity of religious tableaux. Encolpius, and Ascyltus battling over Giton isn’t merely sexual jealousy, it’s a contest for the possession of beauty itself. Gitón is less a psychologically rounded romantic partner than an incarnation of desirability, an almost sacred object passed between men.

And Fellini understands something that many ostensibly more serious treatments of sexuality miss: desire is theatrical. People pose and dress for one another. They construct themselves for the gaze of the desired. The erotic body is never simply a body, it’s a performance of what the body imagines another person wants.

That principle becomes even more extravagant in Querelle. If Satyricon is a pagan amusement park devoted to polymorphous desire, Querelle is its late-night, neon-lit, leather and sailors annex. Fassbinder’s Genet adaptation is one of the most aggressively artificial films ever made about male sexuality. The entire Brest of Querelle was constructed on a soundstage, and Fassbinder deliberately rejected naturalism. The production design reduces the French port to a series of interconnected theatrical spaces: the ship, the brothel, streets, alleyways, walls, phallic columns, staircases, doorways. The sun itself appears to have been painted onto the sky. It’s not Brest, it’s Fassbinder’s idea of Brest as imagined by Jean Genet as imagined by a gay man who spent too much time looking at Tom of Finland’s drawings. And that’s precisely why it works.

The artificiality isn’t a limitation imposed upon the eroticism, it’s eroticism personified. 

The huge phallic structures flanking La Feria, the sailors wandering about in uniforms, the leather, the mustaches, the bare torsos, the exaggerated shoulders, the boots, the swaggering gait, the greasy orange light — all of it belongs to an iconography that had accrued around male bodies in gay visual culture. Fassbinder takes codes traditionally associated with masculine authority (the sailor, the policeman, the soldier, the laborer) and strips them of their conventional heterosexual function. They become fetish objects. The men are no longer merely men, they’re signifiers of men.

That’s why Querelle can feel simultaneously erotic and strangely impersonal. Its characters are human beings, but they’re also types, poses, fantasies, archetypes. They seem to have wandered out of a secret catalog of gay desire.

Cinema has always eroticized the sailor, but Fassbinder’s sailors are almost aggressively aware of their own erotic construction. Their uniforms, bodies and movements make them walking contradictions: representatives of military discipline who inhabit a world of sexual indiscipline; embodiments of masculine authority who are themselves objects of homosexual desire. The camera doesn’t simply look at these men, it cruises them.

This is where Laura Mulvey’s famous formulation about the male gaze becomes wonderfully unstable. Classical cinema in its most familiar form constructs women as the spectacle and men as the bearer of the look. Fassbinder completely reverses that equation. The men are displayed, watched and inspected. They become the bodies around which desire organizes the frame. And Brad Davis becomes the supreme object of that gaze.

Has any American actor ever been as beautiful as Brad Davis is in Querelle? It’s a ridiculous question, which is precisely why it’s the correct one. Davis isn’t merely handsome, Fassbinder photographs him as though his beauty itself were a criminal offense. Querelle’s body is repeatedly depicted as something other characters are unable to resist. He’s the film’s gravitational center even when he’s psychologically opaque. His physical presence is so insistently fetishized that “characterization” seems irrelevant. Querelle exists as a body moving through a world that has been exclusively designed to desire him. The remarkable thing is that Davis himself sometimes seems slightly bewildered by the whole enterprise. That tension is part of the fascination.

Fassbinder doesn’t give us an erotic fantasy that’s been polished into seamless wish fulfillment. He gives us a fantasy that keeps exposing its seams. The acting is stiff; the dialogue is stilted; the sets look painted; the violence is choreographed rather than convincing; the sunlight never behaves like sunlight. Everything reminds us that it’s an artificial construction. But the artificiality somehow makes the eroticism even more intense.

That tension between seduction and artifice has always been crucial in Fassbinder’s oeuvre. Querelle is simultaneously an invitation and a rebuke. It gives the viewer the fantasy of looking while making the viewer conscious of the act of looking. It’s erotic and Brechtian at the same time.

The sex scenes are particularly revealing. Fassbinder doesn’t make them conventionally “sexy,” he makes them tactile. Bodies sweat; hands grip; faces register strain; clothing bunches against skin. The camera observes the physical mechanics of desire with a strange combination of clinical distance and feverish attention. It’s a movie in which everything seems sexually charged even when nobody is having sex.

A leather coat is erotic.

A boot is erotic.

A mustache is erotic.

A sailor’s cap is erotic.

A knife can become erotic because violence and penetration exist in the same symbolic universe. The male body is always potentially violated, desired, possessed and/or betrayed.

The famous knife fight between Querelle and his brother Robert is therefore less an action sequence than an erotic ballet. They circle, mirror and threaten one another. The scene seems to understand something that Fassbinder’s entire film keeps hinting at: in this world, violence and desire aren’t opposites, they’re adjacent forms of intensity.

The same is true of Satyricon.

Fellini’s ancient world is full of feasts, assaults, punishments, spectacles, sexual transactions, bodies displayed for consumption. Pleasure and violence continually occupy the same space. The body is appetite, and appetite is never far from destruction.

That’s why the two movies belong together.

They’re not simply “gay movies” in the modern identity/political sense. They’re films about worlds in which the distinction between sexuality and spectacle has collapsed entirely. The body becomes scenery, scenery becomes erotic, eroticism becomes violence, violence becomes ritual, ritual becomes theater and theater becomes cinema.

If Satyricon is the more expansive of the two works, Querelle is the more concentrated. Fellini creates an entire civilization as erotic spectacle while Fassbinder creates a single erotic civilization on a soundstage.

Fellini’s world sprawls outward. It contains monsters, slaves, emperors, poets, prostitutes, warriors, grotesques, hermaphrodites, animals, dwarfs, giants and every variety of human deformity and beauty. His sexuality is part of a general collapse of boundaries.

Fassbinder’s world is more specifically male. Women exist, but they increasingly seem to be visitors to a universe whose fundamental grammar is masculine desire. Jeanne Moreau’s Lysiane, the proprietor of La Feria, is practically an anthropologist trapped among specimens of her own choosing. Her presence is indispensable precisely because she seems to understand the men better than they understand themselves.

The title character is bisexual, but the movie increasingly becomes a study of male desire without the comforting mediation of heterosexual romance. That’s

one reason Querelle remains so startling. It isn’t simply about gay men trying to live in a heterosexual society, it imagines a society in which the heterosexual world has been aesthetically removed. And once that happens, the film asks what masculinity looks like when men are looking at other men. The answer is: terrifying, ridiculous, beautiful, narcissistic, violent, tender and theatrical. 

Above all, it looks like Brad Davis. 

The casting of Davis is therefore more consequential than it might initially seem. He’s not simply playing a beautiful criminal; his beauty becomes the guiding principle of the entire movie. Other men desire him; men betray and kill one another because of him; men openly fantasize about him. He’s less a person than an icon.

In Satyricon, the beauty is dispersed. Gitón is desirable, but so are many of the bodies and faces that populate Fellini’s carnival. The film’s eroticism is less about one idealized body than about the discovery that everything might become an erotic object.

That may be the deepest link between the two pictures.

Neither director believes in the stable erotic hierarchy that mainstream cinema usually establishes. There are only bodies, glances, gestures, textures and appetites: the world itself becomes sexy. That’s why the mise-en-scène matters so much.

In ordinary filmmaking, production design creates an environment for the characters. In Satyricon and Querelle, the environment behaves like another character — indeed, like another lover. Walls, costumes, colors, architecture and props are saturated with desire. The settings don’t merely contain the erotic action; they participate in it. The two movies are therefore almost impossible to separate from their surfaces.

Take Querelle away from its orange light and phallic architecture and you have something much closer to an ordinary crime melodrama. Remove the theatrical artificiality and the erotic charge would dissipate. Its sexuality resides in the distance between the body and the fabricated world surrounding it.

The same is true of Fellini. The Roman ruins, painted skies, grotesque banquets and monumental interiors aren’t merely background decoration. They’re the psychological landscape of a sexuality that has escaped ordinary realism.

Both films also understand that camp and eroticism aren’t necessarily enemies. Camp exaggerates; eroticism intensifies. The two impulses can coexist seamlessly. Indeed, they may actually require one another.

A Tom of Finland drawing is erotic because it’s so exaggerated. A Fellini face can be erotic because it’s so exaggerated. A Fassbinder sailor becomes erotic because he looks like the idea of a sailor dreamed by somebody who’s never seen a real sailor and doesn’t care.

That’s why calling these films “realistic” would miss the point entirely. They’re mythological. The men are gods, monsters, saints, sinners, sailors, criminals, lovers and sacrifices. Their sexuality isn’t presented as a social problem to be solved, but as an elemental force like hunger, violence, death or religious faith.

And that makes Satyricon and Querelle unusually liberating even when their worlds are grotesque. Neither asks us to approve of or identify with its characters. Neither offers a “respectable” gay protagonist whose sexuality can be absorbed into conventional morality.

Instead, both say something considerably stranger:

Look.

Look at this body.

Look at desire.

Look at what happens when desire becomes the organizing principle of an entire world.

Look until the distinction between beautiful and grotesque begins to disappear.

That’s where Fellini and Fassbinder meet.

They created cinema as a place where heterosexual normalcy has been suspended, and the imagination is allowed to run wild. Their erotic fantasies aren’t necessarily representations of what life should be like. Sometimes they’re pictures of what the unconscious wants to see when nobody is policing the frame.

Hence the Disneyland allusion, the artificial sun, the enormous phallic columns, the sailors, the leather, the bodies and Brad Davis standing there in that impossible orange light as though somebody had designed him specifically to make heterosexual civilization feel suddenly underdressed. 

What makes Satyricon and  Querelle so enduringly provocative is that neither resolves its sexuality into a proposition. They don’t tell us what homosexuality “means,” they make it look like something visual, tactile, architectural, performative and dreamlike.

A great deal of supposedly progressive cinema has wanted to make homosexuality respectable. Fellini and Fassbinder were after something more unruly. Their films make it fantastical. They liberate desire from sociology and return it to the imagination. The result isn’t realism but intoxication.

And perhaps that’s why they remain so singular. There are certainly moviesthat are more explicit, more politically sophisticated, more emotionally intimate, more historically representative. But very few have ever been this horny or understood that mise-en-scène itself can have a libido.

And almost none have ever constructed a world in which every wall, costume, body, shadow, knife, boot, sailor and sunset seems to be whispering the same thing: Look at him.

Movie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of the Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan  ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades:  at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/