Queer is the latest film by Luca Guadagnino, and it premiered in the competition of the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is an adaptation of the short novel by William S Burroughs, and it has been the director’s dream project for years. The novel was written in the early fifties, but it was uncertain if the US would allow most of the material to be released back then, as it contained explicit homosexual content. Jack Kerouac, a fan of the book, believed it would resonate with “East Coast homosexual literary critics”. Seven decades later, the situation is quite different, and the term queer is ubiquitous. I sat down in the Sala Darsena with a fair amount of apprehensiveness.
Guadagnino’s films have not resonated with me in the past, especially his horrific (but not in a good way) remake “cover version with six acts and an epilogue” of Suspiria (2018). When the film begins with a scene in a bar where Lee (Daniel Craig) stares at a young man and says, “You’re not queer”, I started planning an early exit. It turns out that I would be amply rewarded for staying put. The plot is centred around the heroin-addicted Lee and takes place in Mexico in the fifties. He regularly looks for male companionship, and one day, he finds Allerton (Drew Starkey), and sparks start to fly. Later, the story will take a turn towards South America.
A Queer Non-Story
The trip (no pun intended) there is motivated by a quest for a psychedelic drug called Yage. Lee has read that it is used by different governments for telepathic experiments. If that sounds a tad flaky, it should be made clear that the storyline doesn’t have much importance in Queer. This is very much a work of sensory visual and aural experience and a splendid one at that. Once again, Guagdanino works with Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and this time to great effect. The Mexican locations were recreated at Cinecittà and are a pleasure to behold while still having a fair amount of nonentity. Later, the film will enter a hallucinatory mood but still with complete control of its means of expression.
Not that much happens in Queer, and the film moves along in an indolent manner which has caused some critics to lament the “lack of a cohesive story”, but in fact, it works perfectly. It would be simplistic to say that the film’s narration mirrors the characters’ indolence. It is true, but that alone doesn’t account for its success. Sometimes, it is reminiscent of Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon (2022), which is also a film that glides along seemingly aimlessly. The comparisons stop there since Queer is superior to Denis’ work in every imaginable way, not least when it comes to their respective central character, and I am not only referring to their sexual behaviour.
For all the wondrous lensing and production design, the film stands and falls with finding the right actor for the role of Lee. Daniel Craig is more than up to the task. His performance is pitch-perfect, and he captures a handsome man who is still well aware of his ageing and often falls into a wistful mode. It is the kind of performance that wins awards, and I would be perfectly fine with him winning the Coppa Volpi for best actor. The rest of the cast, including Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, are fine as well, but without Craig, the film would not have worked as well as it does.
Burroughs is, of course, also the writer of Naked Lunch, and there are moments when Queer becomes quite similar to Cronenberg’s famous adaptation of that work. Cronenberg’s film was screened in the Berlinale Classics section in 2023 in a glorious restoration.1The producer, Jeremy Thomas, introduced the screening and confirmed that the new version looked exactly as intended. The resemblance is particularly evident during the film’s more trippy parts towards the end. It is not always the case that an artist’s long-awaited dream project becomes a success, but that is definitely the case with Queer.
