Based on an early novel by cult Beat Generation author William Burroughs, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is one of the most hotly anticipated world premieres at the Venice Film Festival this week. Starring Daniel Craig, this unfinished symphony of romantic longing, obsession and addiction boasts fine performances and superlative visual flourishes that help excuse its thin, disjointed narrative. A very handsome package overall, it should earn more critical plaudits and decent audiences for the feted Italian director, who previously explored queer desire in his breakout hit Call Me By Your Name (2017). Craig’s star power should also give the film traction beyond the art-house margins. Following its Venice launch, it screens in Toronto film festival next week.
Queer has a troubled history, including at least one failed attempt to bring it to the big screen, with Steve Buscemi directing. Burroughs wrote it in the early 1950s as a semi-sequel to his first published novel, Junkie (1953), but he was unhappy with the result, leaving it unfinished for more than 30 years. Finally released in incomplete form in 1985, it remains a minor work in the author’s canon, but it has arguably gained significance over the years as one of his most personal, least stylised explorations of his own emotional vulnerability and uneasy relationship with his own sexuality. Guadagnino certainly approaches these themes with tenderness and empathy, gently interrogating the self-loathing that afflicted some gay men in a closeted era long before pride marches and rainbow flags.
Craig stars as Bill Lee, a regular autobiographical avatar for Burroughs. Living in rented rooms and stylishly crumpled suits, Bill belongs to a demi-monde of hedonistic exiles in late 1940s Mexico City, mostly queer men on the run from repressive anti-gay laws in the US. Blessed with private family wealth, just like Burroughs, he spends his days boozing and cruising, trying to kick his heroin habit, and fixating on beautiful younger men, most of whom ignore his yearning gaze. His latest crush is Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a handsome war veteran who is teasingly vague about his sexuality, presenting as straight but curious enough to keep Bill’s hopes simmering. Gradually, despite Gene’s cool ambiguity, their encounters becomes sexual.
Around the film’s midway point, Bill resigns himself to reality, recognising his relationship with Gene is a casual affair, essentially more transactional than romantic. In response, he proposes a joint trip across South America, including a mission to track down the fabled psychoactive substance yage, aka ayahuasca, a plant-based drink that he believes will give him telepathic powers. Lured by assurances that he only needs to “be nice” to Bill a maximum of twice a week, Gene consents to the trip. But travelling with an on-off junkie inevitably brings dramas and complications.
As Queer was published in unfinished form, Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzes have added their own final act, extending and reworking the original text. In their version, Bill and Gene’s pilgrimage to the jungle culminates in them successfully locating the mind-bending yage, assisted by the plainly unhinged Doctor Cotter, played by Lesley Manville in a deliciously deranged comic turn. This drug-fuelled climax abandons realism for surrealism: a powerful fever-dream featuring the vomiting up of organs, flesh-melting embraces and bodies fading into invisibility. This elegantly choreographed sequence has some of the nightmarish beauty of Jonathan Glazer’s work, though it adds little to the film’s central love story.
The film’s impressionistic patchwork finale also draws on other Burroughsian literary motifs, such as the fictional authoritarian state of Annexia, plus incidents borrowed from the author’s own life, notably the notorious fatal shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer 1951 during a drunken “William Tell act”. This tragic accident was previously recreated by director David Cronenberg in his own meta-fictional Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch (1991), so it feels slightly second-hand and superfluous here, perhaps even a little exploitative.
In terms of its LGBT politics, Queer feels very much in fruitful dialogue with 21st century attitudes. Guadagnino makes a point of showing Bill’s disdain towards more effeminate gay men, agonising about whether to accept his destiny as a “fag” and a “pervert”. These slurs jar with modern liberal sensibilities, of course, but they are softer than many of the real contrary statements that Burroughs made about his own conflicted sexuality. Bill is presented very sympathetically here, a lost soul seeking love and sex, companionship and connection in an era where such desires were fraught with risk.
Craig gives a nuanced, quietly anguished, emotionally brittle performance, perhaps his best post-Bond work to date, with a manicured American accent that never slips into directly mimicking Burroughs, despite the autobiographical parallels. But relative screen novice Starkey is too bland as Gene, undeniably a beauty but too flavourless to convince as an obscure object of desire. His handful of sex scenes with Craig are tastefully graphic, more balletic than erotic.
Bill’s Mexico City entourage of fellow queer exiles also includes the perennially unlucky Joe, played by a bearded, paunchy, barely recognisable Jason Schwartzman. Seemingly modelled on Allen Ginsberg, a long-time collaborator and sometime lover of Burroughs, Schwartzman’s droll performance is a joy. The film’s slow-burn opening act could have benefited from more of his antic energy.
After veering from bluesy ballad to wild jungle adventure, semi-requited love story to meandering road movie, Queer concludes more with a whimper than a bang. The final fireworks display of trippy delirium is certainly impressive, and a knowing nod to the more hallucinatory style of later Burroughs novels, but the loose ends of the original text are never really resolved. Guadagnino has remixed an imperfect, incomplete book into an imperfect, incomplete film.
That said, typically for Guadagnino, Queer is still a visually sumptuous, impeccably crafted affair. Blending physical sets with digital effects, the gorgeously retro Mexican cityscapes were mostly created at Rome’s legendary Cinecittà studios, with Sicily and Ecuador providing handsome second-unit locations. A rich score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross leans heavily into mournful jazz and moody electronica, and features a collaborative track with Brazilian icon Caetano Veloso. The boldly anachronistic soundtrack also includes Sinead O’Connor’s tremulously lovely version of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” alongside classic tunes from Nirvana themselves, Prince, New Order and more. Wider cultural homages fill the screen too, from John O’Hara’s scandalous 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra to Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), with a playful nod to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) also in the mix.
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenwriter: Justin Kuritzes
Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Andra Ursuta, Michael Borremans, David Lowery
Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Editinf: Marco Costa
Costumes: Jonathan Anderson
Production designer: Stefano Baisi
Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
Producers: Lorenzo Mieli, Luca Guadagnino
Production companies: The Apartment, Fremantle Company, Frenesy Film
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Spanish
135 minutes
