Based on a story by Jean Genet, the final film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder is many things: a surreal fever dream of subversive eroticism, a tribute to the beauty of its late star, Brad Davis, and an iconic piece of design which drew on the imagery of 1950s muscle magazines as well as the distorted sexual motifs foregrounded by the Surrealists. (Fashion buffs may note the clear correlation between Querelle’s fetishised sailors and the nautical themes of Jean-Paul Gaultier’s 1980s collections.)

His ship run aground, Davis’s naïve but self-seeking young sailor provokes a thunderstorm of violent and sexual response among the quayside drifters who frequent the local bar and brothel. Moreau is the jaded madam who observes and takes part in Querelle’s graphic sexual awakening. Genet took scant interest in the film: it was reported that he declined to see it because smoking was prohibited in the cinema.