There is the kind of teen-heartache crush so vibrantly rendered in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, and then there is the sort of ruinous sexual and romantic obsession depicted in Guadagnino’s new film Queer, which premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday. Adapted from the novel by William S. Burroughs, Queer is a strange and despondent look at a man wasting away from desire. It’s about other things, too—the subtle and overt predations of expat life, the search for transcendent experience—but all seems to loop back to one man’s fixation on another, a maddening half-sated hunger.
Daniel Craig plays Lee, a sozzled, Burroughsian flaneur living in Mexico City in the early 1950s. He spends his time carousing at a handful of bars, having tart conversations with fellow Americans or cruising for sex. He’s disgusted by his proclivities, though not shy about them. Lee is also, we later learn, in the grips of a heroin addiction, which he treats with a resigned offhandedness. Craig, capable of such smoothness when playing James Bond or Benoit Blanc, lets himself be sweaty, disheveled, a disaster reeling and staggering around in a soiled linen suit.
Lee stands in stark contrast to a new arrival on the scene, Gene (the remarkable Drew Starkey), who is young and beautiful and neatly put together. He immediately catches the eyes of the men in this little neighborhood’s orbit, but especially Lee’s. How could he not be drawn to a creature like this: a vision in cream and tawny, a sly knowing seeming to faintly dance across his handsome face. His self-possession is painfully intriguing, as is the way he shifts between hot and cold when in Lee’s presence.
Their dynamic is exactingly realized in the film, familiar to anyone who has contradictorily sought both affection and rejection from a person whose whims and attractions are mercurial. Lee and Gene do hook up, on several occasions, but Lee always frames it as a favor that Gene has done for him, or as Gene’s part of an mutually beneficial exchange in which true care has no place. And yet Lee keeps reaching for Gene anyway; it is a part of the destruction he sees as inevitable to his condition.
Which might make Queer sound like a punishing, morose drama. But that is not the sort of film that Guadagnino makes. Instead, Queer is offbeat, abstract, erratic in mood and tempo—befitting an adaptation of Burroughs’s work. It can be a mean and off-putting film, though some of our revulsion is born of the horror of self recognition. To liven the mood, Guadagnino stages a few sex scenes that—when stripped of context, maybe—certainly qualify as hot. He uses anachronistic songs—there are two Nirvana covers, for example—to score scenes, alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsing, mechanical original compositions. The film is a riot of style and technique, growing ever more surreal as Lee chases after Gene, and after a validation that will never come.
Lee brings Gene on a quest to South America, where Lee plans to seek out a plant that, he claims, locals believe can aid in human telepathy. It’s called yage, more commonly known these days as ayahuasca, and Lee hopes it will open up some portal to understanding—of the world, of himself, of Gene. From one viewpoint, Queer could be assessed as a movie about a man traveling to the depths of the jungle to find out if a guy he likes is really gay or not.
It is, of course, much more than that, plainly and inscrutably. Guadagnino is perhaps most focused on nailing the mood and cadence of Burroughs, the conundrum of cynicism and magical thinking existing alongside one another. I think he gets there, though viewers more familiar with Burroughs will have to be the ultimate judges of that. Fans of Beat-era gay literature, all its grit and dreaminess and self-loathing, will get the most out of the movie. People averse to those particular tones will have a tougher time. Queer is Guadagnino at his most opaque and alienating; even Suspiria is more inviting.
And yet there are captivating sequences and flourishes, erotic or sorrowful or both. The way music and moment clash and complement is beguiling. Guadagnino uses the lot at the Cinecittà studios in Rome to create a fancifully diorama-box Mexico City, all elegantly shabby hotels and glowing nighttime bars. As the movie tips into ever more strangeness, Guadagnino untethers the film from time and space. The climactic ayahuasca scene is a kind of modern dance piece, two fire-lit men melding and pulling apart.
At the heart of the film is something immeasurably sad and glumly relatable, which I wish Gaudagnino had teased out a bit more. But that perhaps would not be true to Burroughs’s intentions, nor I suppose to Guadagnino’s. Queer is meant to be prickly, withholding, enigmatic. To want anything more from it might simply be repeating Lee’s mistake, grasping for something that could never be ours.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
Live Updates From the 2024 Venice Film Festival
-
The “Ketamine Queen” and Matthew Perry’s Hollywood
-
JD Vance, Fresh Off Doughnut-Shop Debacle, Is Booed at Event With Firefighters
-
September Cover Star Jenna Ortega Is Settling Into Fame
-
These Are the Fall 2024 TV Shows That We’ll Be Watching
-
RFK Jr.’s Whale-Beheading Story Gives RFK Jr.’s Bear-Murder Story a Run for Its Money
-
From the Archive: Murder at Sutton Place
The post ‘Queer,’ with Daniel Craig, Is Many Things: Captivating, Alienating, Sorrowful, and Erotic appeared first on Vanity Fair.
