Ran across this recently when checking out Fassbinder's final film, Querelle. Read (and watch) further inside...
Ah, Querelle. This not-terribly-faithful adaptation of Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest is the sort of low-budget art film that looks like it was made 20 years earlier than it actually was. But I sort of mean that as a compliment. There is a beautiful naivete about this movie's fascination with the masculine libido and its obligatory forays into explicit gay sex -- in spirit it's a product of the '70s gay culture of free love, but since it debuted at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic in 1982, it seems bitterly (and prematurely) nostalgic.
Anyhow, I was obviously into it for the hot sailors and dawn-drenched streetscapes, but I was also into it for Brad Davis, who played Sally Field's street-musician paramour in Sybil, one of my favorite movies ever:
Anyhow, Querelle. The clip above from the opening credits introduces you to an aging whore played with apparently limitless nerve by Jeanne Moreau. She doesn't have a lot to do in the movie except dance, sing, and bed sexually confused reprobates. And did I mention sing? She sings.
Her observations on the Tarot spread in the opening scene doesn't make any actual sense that I can discern, but I think the cards shown were deliberately chosen to underscore her lines, which is nice. When she places the Sun card up at the top of the reading -- a position usually associated with conscious awareness -- she comments, "You have a brother," clearly interpreting the two cherubic figures on the card as the querent and his sibling. Then she draws the Lovers card for the bottom of the spread, the position associated with unconscious awareness or something hidden from view. In this spot, the two lovers sort of mirror the two cherubic children, which I assume is the source of her comment to the querent that he and his brother "love one another more than you'd like to."
Then she comments that the brother in question is in great danger -- this is in response to the last four cards, which are the Devil, Death, the Moon, and the Tower, respectively. At first glance it's sort of lazy to haul out the same tired doom-imagery to make this point. OH NOES, TEH DEATH CARD! But when asked what kind of danger, Moreau specifies, "In danger of finding himself."
That. Is interesting. Because boys and girls, if I was reading those last four cards, I would probably see someone who was mired in the lustful appetites of the material world; someone whom others would recognize as a being in transition and might try to influence or take advantage of; someone who was on a long, dark journey through an unfamiliar world; someone whose worldview was about to endure drastic, cataclysmic changes. And this is a practically perfect introduction of the sailor Querelle -- all it's missing is a sweaty, scoop-neck tank top.
In the movie's final moments, Moreau throws down a few more cards for Querelle's brother:
The significator is the same -- the Chariot -- but now instead of the Emperor covering it, we have the Fool instead. The conclusion that Moreau draws -- that the querent doesn't actually have a brother at all -- is so wonderfully preposterous that you just have to laugh. And laugh and laugh. And laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. So that's what they all do. The End. (Except I'm pretty sure she means it.)
You can't really examine these things too closely, they are small moments in a very large, very fucked up movie. But after so many movies where the cards seem to be chosen either at random or for maximum scare-factor, it was really nice to see a spread that actually fit what was happening on screen. Mostly.
(Also, I haven't read the novel that Querelle is based on. Does the Tarot reading appear there in any form? Anyone?)
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