Queer

Coming straight off the explosive ménage à trois sports drama Challengers, Luca Guadagnino impresses once again with Queer. The film’s lead, Daniel Craig, is generating Oscar buzz. It helps that Craig is playing an alter-ego version of William S. Burroughs and that Guadagnino has re-teamed with Challenger’s fellow screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. A film about alienation, addiction, longing, love, and redemption is all in the forefront in this exceptional adaptation. Craig’s masterful performance in Queer is powerful and career-defining as it’s filled with fearlessness and melancholy. It’s quite remarkable that Guadagnino has pulled off two extraordinary pieces of cinema in the same year.

Where Challengers was very energetic and ferocious in technique and narrative, Queer is more somber and mesmeric. It allows the audience to contemplate the content more. Kuritzkes adapts the self-autobiographical novel by Burroughs. Guadagnino’s visual style is once again artful, in which he utilizes the landscapes, cityscapes, and the streets of 1950s Mexico City. A setting where many artists went to retreat during an era of red scare McCarthyism that sought out anyone who was gay, an artist, or both as a subversive communist. Contrary to sectors of Mexico City where artists could retreat and be themselves artistically and sexually. Guadagnino’s visual style is also very dreamlike, especially the third act that merges the elliptical with the surreal while still feeling emotionally affecting at the same time. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom also delivers a hallucinatory eye to the imagery, which has many quiet and discomforting dream sequences. Craig’s performance is rewarding; he also lights up the screen in each frame with his anguish and emotional rawness.

Courtesy A24 Films

Craig is Lee, who feels like an American exile who lives in cheap motels, hangs out at bars, drinks often, does heroin, and picks up various gay men. The film’s setting is in the 50s, and the book was published in 1985, and this would mark Guadagnino’s fourth film to take place in a different era, with Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All taking place in the 70s, and Suspiria takes place in the 70s. Lee ends up getting infatuated with a local gigolo named Gene (Drew Starkey), a fellow American who hustles middle-aged women on the side.

After one night, the two men make very passionate love that goes beyond a hook-up. There is a true affection between them that is both intimate and intellectual. On days when Gene goes off to work to seduce women, Lee’s loneliness grows. He resorts to substances to patch up his alienation. To get more alone time with Gene, Lee ends up persuading him to go on a road trip to South America to pursue a hallucinogen that helps give premonition powers. It’s a journey that takes some surreal turns, especially when it leads them to a female scientist (an unrecognizable Lesley Manville). It’s a sequence that recalls the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Claire Denis in terms of how sensory it is. The scenes between the two men are also very sensual. We also have filmmaker David Lowrey in a small supporting role.

Courtesy A24 Films

Craig’s performance is quite commanding as Burrough’s alter ego. Sporting light-colored suits, hats, and glasses while boozing with whiskey and tequila, Craig taps into the character of Lee so vividly, and the tone is erotic but always done tastefully.  Much of the film is about Lee’s loneliness and his writer’s block. So much of the film is Lee retreating to bars, attempting to sustain his loneliness and hopping bar to bar. There is a great moment where Nirvana’s Come as You Are is rendered over the soundtrack, and the impact is gratifying.

Guadagnino stages the scenes with a personal perspective, and its textures are some of the most restrained. Guadagnino has always been a very stylized and sensual filmmaker. Queer carries on this approach, and he allows the audience to ponder the setting and space. These are gay characters, and he shows how people evolve over time with their desires. The film’s final 10 minutes are spellbinding and emotionally powerful, in which Guadagnino sublimely merges the surreal with the emotive as it explores Borrough’s broken heart. Craig delivers deep emotions, and Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes stay true to Borough’s groundbreaking novel. Of course, many LGBTQ films have covered similar themes before, but Burrough’s Queer was some of the finest literature written as the material dives into a human understanding of the alienation, repression, and finally liberation of what being gay is like. As the film concludes, William S. Burroughs alter-ego of Lee finds salvation through his art, even though he remains emotionally shattered and too elderly to find a new lover for himself. At the end there are only memories, and Guadagnino plays great tribute the literary icon. With that, Queer is a memorable film and one I hope finds an audience just as Challengers has.

QUEER is now playing in limited theaters. It opens in Metro Detroit theaters on Thursday, December 13th.