Queer, the latest effort from director Luca Guadagnino, brings the 1985 novella by William Burroughs to life in a gloriously messy exploration of longing and obsession sure to leave you scratching your head long after you leave the theatre. Featuring a bravura performance from Daniel Craig as Burroughs’ alter ego William Lee, Queer takes an unorthodox approach to translating this period tale to the big screen.
I have long been a fan of Guadagnino’s films, as well as his willingness to throw himself completely into whatever creative impulse strikes his fancy, unafraid to explore new genres or visual styles in the pursuit of his filmic ambitions. His films can be polarizing, but he could certainly never be faulted for lack of effort. Demonstratively, Queer is bursting at the seams with wildly creative concepts and idiosyncratic design choices, but feels more like a collection of disconnected experiments than a cohesive whole.
The first (and best) chapter of the film follows Lee, an American writer akin to Burroughs himself, as he flits about 1950s Mexico City delivering tequila fueled rants to just about anyone who will listen. Holding court in a series of bars and cafes pontificating about whatever topic crosses his hyperactive mind, Lee careens sweatily from one hedonistic encounter to the next, epitomizing a certain type of bourgeois, bohemian intellectual expat content to limit the majority of his interactions to others like himself (including a nearly unrecognizable Jason Schwarzman as Ginsberg stand-in Joe). In keeping with his protagonist’s perspective, Guadagnino’s depiction of the city feels emphatically stylized and somewhat sanitized of authenticity. Sweeping any actual Mexicans largely to the margins, the city (shot largely on soundstages at Rome’s famed Cinecittà studios) feels more like a writer’s fantasy of the city than the real thing.
Leaning into this surreal quality, Guadagnino has once again teamed up with composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to deliver an anachronistically atmospheric score amplifying the dreamlike qualities of the film. Set to Nirvana’s “Come as You Are,” one of the film’s most striking sequences finds Lee locking eyes with the man destined to become the object of his romantic obsession… over a roadside cockfight. As Eugene Allerton (a flawless Drew Starkey) emerges from the night, all bronzed beauty and cold indifference, Lee is instantly captivated, and strangely lost for words. Finding the young man shortly thereafter at Ship Ahoy, one of his usual haunts, the writer instantly makes a clown of himself, earning himself little more than a withering look of disdain.
It is fascinating to watch Craig transform himself into the insecure, needy, and verbally incontinent Lee. Unshackled from the slick strictures of the James Bond legacy, he inhabits the role with naked vulnerability, not a trace of vanity about him as he telegraphs the desperate hold the younger man has upon him. Starkey, in turn, is perfection as the coolly calculated Eugene, keenly aware of his own allure and seemingly happy to play to others’ desires in the interests of funding his continued foreign adventure. At first content to giving Lee what he wants, he eventually tires of the older man’s incessant need for him. Unwilling to walk away from his new addiction, Lee makes the offers him a bargain: come away to South America, give in occasionally to his desires, and he’ll happily pay his way.
The following chapters see them make their way to Ecuador as Lee descends into the depths of withdrawal, not just from the heroin he left behind in Mexico, but also from Eugene, increasingly contemptuous. Having become obsessed with the telepathic properties promised by the hallucinogenic plant yage, Lee drags Eugene into the jungle to seek out an American botanist by the name of Cotter (an over-the-top Lesley Manville). In the film’s greatest divergence from the novella, they are successful in their quest, with Cotter guiding them through their hallucinogenic journey. As the sequence evolves into a kind of wild hellscape, with the pair vomiting still-beating hearts and converging into one frenzied supernatural entity, a door is opened, but neither is willing to walk through it. A surreal epilogue attempts to ascribe further meaning to their journey, but leaves us only questioning.
Queer is currently in cinemas.
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