Queer
Luca Guadagnino (2024)
Daniel Craig wasn’t entirely an exile in Bondworld during his long stint as 007. Between Casino Royale (2006) and No Time to Die (2021), the first and last of his five appearances as James Bond, Craig’s cinema credits ranged from Defiance (2008) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) to Knives Out (2019), in which he played Detective Benoit Blanc; his first post-Bond role was Blanc again in Glass Onion (2022). Even so, you can understand why Craig – now unquestionably a movie star, relatively less esteemed as an actor – was keen to play the lead in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. It’s paying off, of course. As a gay-sex-drink-and-drugs-dependent expat American, Craig is more of a revelation than someone rated a top-notch thesp rather than a star – a Benedict Cumberbatch, say – could hope to be. Daniel Craig is winning plaudits and prizes for his performance. But Queer is a remarkably boring film.
The screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes (he also wrote Challengers, another Guadagnino picture released this year) is adapted from William S Burroughs’ novella of the same name. Although Burroughs wrote Queer immediately after Junkie, their publication dates were more than thirty years apart – Junkie in 1953, Queer in 1985: the latter’s homosexual content was liable to be judged obscene in the US in the 1950s. In his introduction to the published book, Burroughs confirmed that his protagonist, William Lee, was an alter ego – more specifically, that he represented Burroughs ‘off heroin’, although Lee, in Guadagnino’s version of the story at least, is certainly on other narcotics. He’s part of a little colony of middle-aged gay Americans in Mexico City, in the early post-World War II years. He drinks in bars with Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman), John Dumé (Drew Droege) and, briefly, Jim Cochan (the film-maker David Lowery). They swap epigrams, reviews of their latest lovers and thoughts about who they’d like to go to bed with next – these sex partners are always younger men. The narrative starts to take shape once Lee (as everyone calls him) claps eyes on Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), recently a GI but now another expat in Mexico.
Take shape is actually a bit of a euphemism. Even after Lee becomes obsessed with Eugene, Guadagnino continues to alternate scenes in shadowy bars with scenes in dusky bedrooms, a repetition that doesn’t yield intensity. Eugene is, from Lee’s point of view, maddeningly elusive: he’s usually seen in bars with a young woman (Ronia Ava); he won’t admit, verbally, to being queer. He’s not physically elusive, though: he and Lee are soon having sex together. And while Lee and his contemporaries may have emigrated to live lives they don’t dare lead in the US, there’s next to no suggestion that gay promiscuity is dangerous in the Mexican capital. The middle-aged expats’ existence there comprises much more talk than drama. After a while, Lee asks Eugene to accompany him on a trip to South America. Eugene demurs at first but then agrees to come along. I was glad he did, if only for a change of scenery.
Lee travels south on a mission to obtain and partake of yagé (aka ayahuasca), a plant that supposedly endows telepathic powers. Why he wants and how he means to use ESP is less clear. This may be an instance of Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes knowing their source material and its author so well that they forget their audience may not. I haven’t read Queer but am aware that William Burroughs had a long-standing interest in ‘magic’ and travelled to the Amazon rainforest in search of ayahuasca – a journey recorded in The Yagé Letters (1963), a collection of correspondence between him and Allen Ginsberg. Cinema has traditionally struggled to realise the writing life on screen. It’s no loss that Guadagnino thinks better than to include shots of Lee typing and smoking furiously then, also furiously, ripping sheets from the typewriter and hurling scrunched-up balls of paper across the floor. Typed manuscripts, replete with crossings out, do feature, though, in the montage that opens Queer and a reprise of this late on. In between, there’s hardly any indication that Lee is a writer (even a blocked one) – or anything much else, other than a boozy, sex-hungry flâneur.
The move from Mexico City to Ecuador does have a few immediate benefits. Guadagnino’s affinity with light and bright colours was evident as far back as I Am Love (2009). He enjoyed his greatest success (so far) with the lustrous Call Me by Your Name (2017). He’s constrained in the Mexican scenes. Most of them take place indoors and in subdued lighting. Even the exterior sequences in Mexico City don’t seem to be happening outside – and probably weren’t: the film was shot mostly at Cinecittà Studios. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s ingenious lighting sometimes suggests Hopper scenes or even a de Chirico palette but Guadagnino doesn’t seem at home in small, shaded places. He’s more himself again when he can show Lee and Eugene swimming together in the sea off the coast of Ecuador. Before that, the older man can’t get hold of his usual fix locally: his withdrawal symptoms give Daniel Craig the opportunity for some bravura shaking and stumbling before Lee manages to see a doctor (Michaël Borremans), who helpfully prescribes a supply of what he needs.
Craig has devised a convincing walk for Lee. His hats and white linen suit make him quite a conspicuous figure; his slightly mincing gait is cagier. Here’s a man whose movement suggests years of practice in self-concealment. Craig also delivers his many lines with aplomb, though when he speaks you’re conscious of the vocal layers he’s affecting – the American accent, the waspish edge. All in all, it’s a strong performance that vindicates Luca Guadagnino’s choice of lead. It’s good news too – not just for straight actors but for filmgoers who appreciate what acting really is – that Guadagnino, a high-profile gay film-maker, has publicly dismissed the idea that Lee should have been played by a gay actor. David Sexton’s New Statesman review implies that Guadagnino has also said that ‘he didn’t want to make a story about unrequited love. Yet that is precisely the bitter subject of Queer the novel …’ Whatever Guadagnino may have intended, his film does reflect that theme – in what should be an interesting way: as noted above, he shows that, for Lee, continuing physical intimacy with Eugene isn’t return enough for his feelings for the younger man. The result isn’t interesting, alas, because not enough happens in the story and the characters don’t develop. (Queer comprehensively denies the Aristotelian idea of plot as character revealed by action.) Drew Starkey delivers what Guadagnino presumably wants from him – a portrait of reticence, stubbornly undramatic.
The film disappoints in other ways. As screen dreams go, most of Lee’s aren’t up to much. Most of the music is emphatically post-1950s (New Order, Nirvana, Prince and Radiohead, among others). The main score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross does include a melancholy, relatively timeless oboe theme but, as you’d expect, this isn’t typical of the Reznor-Ross contribution as a whole. I wondered for a while if Guadagnino meant the anachronistic music as a counterpoint to what’s on screen – as a means of stressing how different queer life was before the times in which this music was actually first heard. But that doesn’t add up: as far as I know, the music doesn’t have gay connections; besides, the film doesn’t do much to illustrate the social difficulties of Lee et al. To be honest, I wasn’t sure, as I watched, of exactly when Queer was happening. It was only when ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’ came up on the soundtrack, to accompany shots of Lee and Eugene on the road to Ecuador, that I decided the story was roughly contemporary with Stan Jones’s great song. (Jones released the original version in 1948; Guadagnino uses the Vaughn Monroe cover that reached number one in the Billboard charts the following year.) Just as in Terence Davies’ Benediction (2021), ‘Riders’ briefly gives proceedings a shot in the arm.
Daniel Craig isn’t the only surprising casting. The quest for yagé takes Lee to a plants expert (Andrés Duprat) who tells him about Dr Cotter, a scientist doing research in the jungle beyond Quito. On arrival there, Lee and Eugene are startled by the viper that, Dr Cotter explains, she keeps for purposes of security, although she has also a (silent) husband (Lisandro Alonso, another film-maker). Her scary presence, in combination with a strikingly receded hairline and weird brown complexion, makes you wonder if a local tribe started trying to shrink Dr Cotter’s head but then chickened out. She’s played by … Lesley Manville. Of course: who else would you get for a gun-toting, tough-talking, pipe-smoking American botanist? Manville is so reliably good that I look forward to watching her whatever she’s in. She’s one of those actors who lift the actors they’re sharing the screen with. Although Monica Dolan delivered a terrific individual turn in the BBC’s Sherwood this summer, Manville and David Morrissey supplied much the best moments involving two people. In her unshowy way, she carries the enjoyable Moonflower Murders, also recently on BBC. It is a pleasure to see Lesley Manville for the ten minutes she’s on screen in Queer but a minor pleasure – that of watching a first-rate actor bring skill and integrity to a part in which they’re ludicrously miscast.
After imbibing the doctor’s yagé brew, Lee and Eugene hallucinate spectacularly – they appear to throw up their hearts – and have ecstatic sex before Guadagnino jumps forward to an epilogue ‘two years later’. Lee returns alone to Mexico City, where Joe tells him that Eugene went on another South American trip a few months previously. (It’s not clear whether Lee and Eugene had seen each other at all post-Dr Cotter.) Lee dreams that he finds Eugene in the room next to his. He places a glass on the young man’s head and fires a gunshot that hits not the glass but Eugene. Lee holds him tight before Eugene vanishes. Lee then reappears as an old man, who lies down on a bed and seemingly dies.
Although protracted, the epilogue does succeed in blurring fantasy and reality, to discomfiting effect. It’s also a reminder that the material William S Burroughs put in Queer was autobiographical in more ways than one. Eugene Allerton is based on a recently discharged US Navy serviceman with whom Burroughs ‘made friends’ (Wikipedia) in Mexico City. Although he was pursuing men there, Burroughs at the time had a common-law wife, Joan Vollmer. The couple were at a party one night, and were both drunk, when Burroughs produced a handgun and told Joan, ‘It’s time for our William Tell act’. She obligingly balanced a glass on her head; Burroughs shot, missed the glass and killed her. It wasn’t until I started writing this review that I noticed that Eugene’s female companion, who disappears quickly from the film, is named in the IMDb cast list as ‘Joan’.
17 December 2024