RATING
Director(s): Luca Guadagnino
Country: Mexico, United States
Author: William S. Burroughs, Justin Kuritzkes
Actor(s): Daniel Craig, Daan de Wit, Jason Schwartzman
Written by Tom Augustine.
We understand two things instinctually when expat Lee (Daniel Craig) first lays eyes on Eugene (Drew Starkey) in the crowd watching a cockfight in Mexico City — that this is love at first sight, and that this will not be a restorative or nourishing love, but one that ravages and destroys. Lee’s first name is Will, connecting the character to its original author, William S Burroughs. Both Wills languished in Mexico City, carried a gun, bounced with limited success between queer hotspots in this notably Americanised area of Mexico, routinely went on treks to South America in search of the fabled root ayahuasca, and repeatedly fell in and out of addictive cycles with alcohol, heroin, and the lovers in their lives. Around the time Burroughs first started writing Queer, he also murdered his wife, icon of the Kerouacian Beat era Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of ‘William Tell’, in which Burroughs attempted to shoot a glass off of Joan’s head, hitting her temple instead. Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes (who also wrote last year’s Challengers) adapt Queer to be a faithful examination of the writer’s novel, but also of the writer’s life. The William Tell game appears in the film, in a different context to the real-life events (Lee has no wife or children in the film), but that foreknowledge lends a special resonance to its tragic appearance here. The end card summarily reintroduces the film as William S Burroughs’ Queer.
Appropriately for such a tortured and damned existence as Burroughs’, Queer is a rich, elusive, at-times frustrating work, the second excellent film released by Guadagnino in just a year, and one that contains suggestive parallels with Challengers, the more crowd-pleasing and antic of the two Kuritzkes-penned films (the relationship of Kuritzkes with his partner, filmmaker Celine Song, who has also in her last two films Past Lives and Materialists depicted fraught love triangles, is yet another fascinating parallel at work in this set of stories). Guadagnino seems aware that Queer is something of a B-side, an acquired taste, a dreamier and altogether harsher film that turns away from explicit understanding at every chance. Guadagnino is perhaps the filmmaker of his generation and ilk with the strongest claim to the auteur label — even his hot-shit contemporaries like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers don’t share the same ineffable personal stamp that Guadagnino’s films have, with their lush picture-making and defiant, daring visual swings for the fence. With Queer, Guadagnino takes another ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach, not unlike his misfire Suspiria, but with far more success — where that film too often felt like style for style’s sake, rare is the visual flourish here that doesn’t feel intricately tied to the doom and desolation of Lee, as he desperately clings to the dregs of affection offered by the younger, flightier Eugene. If there’s a dominant image in Queer, it is the gesture of an arm outstretched, fingers splayed, reaching but not touching. Guadagnino returns to this repeatedly, even at times utilising a double exposure effect to show Lee’s desire to touch Eugene even as his outer shell recoils or hunches down around a shot glass. It’s these repeated, dizzying evocations of longing that ensure Queer retains a lingering, devastating atmosphere even as it ranges into shaggier territory.
One of several major awards-season films making their television premiere on Rialto Channel this month, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer caps a year in which the Italian auteur confidently bounded from strength to strength. Overwhelmingly rich, elusive and sensual, this adaptation of the William S. Burroughs story rests upon the shoulders of a staggering Daniel Craig performance, offering a vision of a performer only growing in stature in the post-Bond wilderness.
Queer is entirely dependent on a performance for the ages to work, and thankfully they have one in Daniel Craig, whose work here is arguably the finest of 2024, handily beating out the five performers who were actually nominated for the Oscar. His Lee is a mess; a disheveled, unshaven and sickly figure clad in a cream suit not dissimilar from the one worn by the similarly bedraggled Josh O’Connor character in La Chimera. The story of Queer is told in what Craig conveys in his eyes — those famously frosty baby blues, here full of tremulousness and a tragic awareness of how susceptible he is to being destroyed. What made Craig one of the finest ever James Bond iterations was that angular sharpness, the feeling that he was never entirely comfortable in his skin, that the surface cool only ever barely withheld the masculine violence just below. There is no cover for Lee — he is painfully on display at all times, an open wound that just happens to attract the occasional fly to feed. Another common occurrence in Queer is the refrain ‘you’re not queer’, usually utilised to describe Eugene, Lee’s sometimes-paramour. Whether or not Eugene actually is queer or is just engaging in a youthful fancy is one of an enormous supply of mysteries that swirl around Starkey’s superb, feline performance. The feelings he actually has for Lee are largely unexplained — just as it seems that his Eugene has, to borrow a common parlance, got the ick, there he is on a quixotic journey into the jungle as Lee’s only companion. The more we come to see Eugene, the less we ultimately truly perceive him. What is clear is that Eugene will never be the key to freeing the anguish alive in Lee’s heart, and as Lee pushes onward, the worse it’s going to get.
Much has been made of Queer’s third act descent into dream logic and fantasy, largely care of a trip on that aforementioned ayahuasca, administered by a delightfully batty Lesley Manville in a brief, welcome supporting turn. To me, this is the only direction Queer could reasonably take, and the film largely improves the more it delves into instinctual displays of desires fulfilled and unfulfilled. Guadagnino has always been a pictorial filmmaker, at times to his detriment — there are passages, in Queer and elsewhere, where the prettiness of the pictures undercuts the emotionality of the story — but when Guadagnino and master cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (also responsible for last year’s gloriously lensed Grand Tour and Trap) land on an especially evocative image we are rewarded with psychic visions quite unlike anything else in mainstream cinema of the current day. Guadagnino’s control of style and commitment to a kind of textural sensuality elevates him above other pretenders to the throne (most commonly associated with A24). Queer is busy, overwhelmingly rich and at times too concerned with its own visual splendour and off-kilter approach for its own good — jury is still out on whether the director’s penchant for anachronistic needle-drops is a hindrance or a boon — but the discomfort and the overwhelming aching of the film is what emerges most vividly. It’s a film about loneliness, and about not wanting to be alone, and I confess that I was bowled over by another recurrent image, one with significance to my own life — that of lovers’ legs intertwined in a bed, despairingly imagined by Lee as he decomposes solo on a dirty hotel mattress.
Queer premieres on September 27 at 8:30 PM on Rialto Channel (Sky, Channel 39)