Nobody does forbidden longing in far-off places quite like Luca Guadagnino. He whisked us off to Italy for the passionate affairs of I Am Love and Call Me by Your Name; gave us love and death on a Sicilian island in A Bigger Splash; and took us all across America in the cannibal romance Bones and All. Now he's made Queer, a moody account of thwarted longing that begins in an expat-heavy corner of Mexico City during the early 1950s — a world that Guadagnino brings to life in all its sweaty-scuzzy glory.
The story follows an American drifter named William Lee, played by Daniel Craig with a louche smile and nary a hint of 007 elegance. Addicted to booze and heroin, Lee spends his days hopping from bar to bar, hoping to lock eyes and more with the handsome young men he spots there and around town. And few are more handsome than Eugene Allerton, a freshly discharged U.S. Navy serviceman played by a terrific Drew Starkey. Allerton is trim, slender and aloof to the point of disdainful, which makes Lee lust for him all the more.
In time, after a few meals and many drinks, the two fall into bed, in a scene that Guadagnino films with both roughness and tenderness. But once isn't enough for Lee, and he spends every minute trying to keep this enigmatic young beauty from slipping away.
Lee is a fictionalized stand-in for the Beat Writer William S. Burroughs, whose years spent living in Mexico were eventful, to say the least. He began writing Queer in 1952, while awaiting trial for the killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, during what he initially said was a drunken game of William Tell.
Burroughs never finished the book, which was finally published, in its incomplete form, in 1985. By that point, he had become a countercultural icon, known for his boldly experimental works like Naked Lunch, his struggles with addiction, and his many sexual relationships with men and women.
Guadagnino has said in interviews that he read Queer at a young age and has wanted to film it for years. That may surprise some of the director's fans, since his swoony romanticism — on display in the recent Challengers — isn't an obvious fit with the biting rawness of Burroughs' prose.
At the same time, Guadagnino clearly likes to push against expectations, and his horror movies, like Suspiria, have shown a flair for the surreal and grotesque. Even when Queer's narrative loses momentum, it's fascinating to see a filmmaker known for his lush, beautiful surfaces try to connect with a writer's famously uncompromising ugliness.
For the first hour or so, the screenplay, by Justin Kuritzkes, is largely faithful to its source. But things take a weird turn once Lee talks Allerton into a trip to South America, so they can find a psychedelic called yagé, or ayahuasca, which can apparently confer telepathic powers.
Deep in the jungles of Ecuador, Guadagnino essentially tries to imagine the mind-blowing ending that Burroughs never wrote. The director is clearly having fun, filling the screen with hallucinatory imagery and introducing a gun-toting healer, played by an unrecognizable Lesley Manville. In one maddening and mesmerizing sequence, a drugged-out Lee and Allerton dance silently in the nude, their bodies twisting and melting together as though under a kaleidoscope.
Guadagnino is working overtime to honor Burroughs. In the thoroughly bonkers epilogue, set back in Mexico, he goes well beyond the parameters of the novel to weave in moments from the writer's tumultuous life. But the reason Queer works as well as it does has everything to do with Craig's performance.
It's worth remembering that, long before he became James Bond — or a gay detective in the Knives Out movies — Craig played the tempestuous younger lover of the painter Francis Bacon in the 1998 drama Love Is the Devil. He flips that equation brilliantly in Queer. With robust physicality and delicate emotion, he shows us a man in wretched yet defiant thrall to his wants — for sex, for love, for a moment of out-of-body transcendence. It's a singular performance, but also, in its expression of pure desire, a deeply human one.
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