If you know Daniel Craig only as James Bond, “Queer” is liable to throw you for a loop. In this new film from Luca Guadagnino, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, Craig, 56, plays a drug addict whose sexual escapades and heroin use are filmed with matter-of-fact candor.
But if you knew Craig even before he was pressed into Her Majesty’s Secret Service — when he was still an up-and-coming young actor who appeared in risky, sexually explicit films like “Love Is the Devil” and “The Mother” — then you might guess that “Queer” is much more in line with his sensibilities than some of the big studio fare he’s made recently are. At the film’s Venice news conference, he all but confirmed that hunch.
“If I wasn’t in the movie and saw this movie, I’d want to be in it,” Craig told reporters. “It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there. They’re challenging but hopefully incredibly accessible.”
Adapted from the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs, “Queer” follows Lee (Craig), an American expat wasting away in Mexico City. Most of Lee’s waking hours are spent pursuing some sort of high, whether that means drinking to excess in dive bars, cruising any handsome man to cross his path, or shooting up heroin while all alone in his apartment.
In his linen suits, Lee lurches through life like a well-attired zombie until he meets Allerton (Drew Starkey), a beguiling young drifter whose sexuality seems up for grabs. Does he like Lee or does he just like being liked? Allerton says awfully little, which only beguiles Lee even more. As the older man’s romantic obsession grows, he entices Allerton to help him search for a drug that can supposedly induce a type of telepathy; if it can be scored, maybe he’ll learn what the object of his affection is really thinking.
Written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, the Burroughs novel is slight and scuzzy. Guadagnino takes a much different approach to the source material, building lavish sets (this Mexico City was erected at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios) and imbuing the story with a sweeping romanticism.
“Daniel, in our first Zoom, was adamant that this would be a love story vaster than empires,” Guadagnino said at the news conference. (A24 has picked up the film for distribution.)
Still, Lee’s sexual escapades are hardly given short shrift. Before he links up with Allerton, Lee has two encounters with a hustler played by the singer Omar Apollo, whose film debut is spent mostly in the nude. During those scenes and the many explicit moments of gay intimacy that follow, the man sitting next to me groaned with displeasure and murmured, “Oh, God.” Then, when the end credits rolled, he booed as angrily as a ticked-off French critic at Cannes.
Craig said he was unfazed by the explicit encounters. “There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set,” he said. “We just wanted to make it as touching and real and natural as we possibly could. We kind of had a laugh, we tried to make it fun.”
Though Guadagnino has directed films like “Call Me by Your Name” and “Challengers,” which are shot through with eroticism, he acknowledged that in some ways, he’s an unlikely interpreter of all this sexually forward material.
“I can count on two hands the lovers I’ve had in my life,” he said. Lee’s other addictions hold little appeal for him, too: “I am a gentleman who goes to sleep very early, never takes drugs in my life, never smoked a cigarette.”
Still, when it comes to his art, Guadagnino has never been afraid to take risks. The director makes films that push a little further than most, and if that charge leads Guadagnino and Craig to portray people who operate in the margins of society, it’s a place they’re happy to explore.
“I love the idea of seeing people and not judging them, of making sure that even the worst person is the person you identify with,” he said.
Craig added: “If I was writing a part and trying to tick off things I wanted to do, this would fulfill them.”
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