Adapting the work of William S. Burroughs is no easy task, and Luca Guadagnino challenges this notion head-on in his on-screen transposition of his second novel, Queer. Acting as the antithesis of sorts to his most commercially successful films, Challengers and Call Me By Your Name, Queer presents a protagonist in total alienation and quickly proceeds to do the same with his audience through a 138-minute-long journey of self-destruction.
Guadagnino introduces audiences to expat William Lee (Daniel Craig) in a conversation with a potential match for his longing desires. However, things aren’t going how he’d hoped, ending with him breaking down in public, with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom capturing him through an overhead shot in front of blissful purple flowers. It’s the first clue audiences get of a dissonance between the idyllic, almost artificial world Guadagnino puts on the screen and Lee’s fruitless existence as a man whose aspirations for lust and eventual love can and will never be satisfied.
Lee believes he’s found someone to love and be loved in Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a young student who makes it clear to everyone that he is in a relationship with a girl (Andra Ursuta) but begins to experiment with a different kind of love as he spends more time with Lee. However, Allerton doesn’t have the same feelings as Lee does for him, which creates a fragmented disconnection within their relationship. Lee wants to lock his body on him while Allerton attempts to fight his inner feelings and almost push the man who loves him away.
This is all strikingly conveyed through a career-best performance by Daniel Craig, who imbues Lee with great sensitivity in the film’s first chapter until Guadagnino moves away from this burgeoning relationship by not giving his protagonist – and ultimately audiences – a form of satisfaction. Lee wants to love, but he doesn’t seem to love who he is. He’d rather numb himself from the physical and psychological pain of living through excessive use of drugs and alcohol than begin to show appreciation for the people he’s around and spends time with.
Queer is a Complex and Multi-Layered Drama
There will be many interpretations of how Guadagnino repurposes Burroughs to the screen because its primary structure opens multiple avenues of meaning. It helps that the filmmaker reteams with Mukdeeprom, a frequent collaborator of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has given us some of the most metaphorical films of the past decade, with the Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and, most recently Memoria. In these films, nature is a character, and atmosphere precedes narrative. It’s not necessarily about extracting significance from a single image or line of dialogue but about how its entire experience makes us feel. When Memoria opens with a deafening boom and patiently investigates the origins of this sound, it positions us to listen and observe. By doing so, we surrender our reliance on ‘narrative’ and experience the movie as a ‘feeling,’ to which we can’t box in ‘three acts.’
The same can be said for Queer, which employs a dreamlike, anachronistic structure that quickly destablizes. The film is set in the 1940s, yet, at some point, Lee walks through the streets of Mexico in slow-motion as Nirvana’s Come As You Are blares through the speakers. But this is also exacerbated by a town that looks completely artificial, with Guadagnino frequently showcasing this trickery through a deft, almost mind-blowing, use of miniatures and smartly-rendered CGI that renders this place as plastic as the dreams, or hallucinations, our protagonist experiences. Guadagnino didn’t shoot the movie in Mexico but recreated a vintage in Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. He never hides it. He constantly points out to the audience that this entire city is a fabrication of his mind and, by extension, Lee’s. A lesser director would’ve attempted to sell the set as reality, but since most of the setting is blurred out, Guadagnino shows it to all of us.
Eventually, dreams blend in with reality. Or reality blends in with dreams. It’s hard to tell, and not even an Ayahuasca trip deep in the jungle can solve this internal blur he feels inside. Guadagnino slightly teeters with surreal images in its first two chapters but keeps it at mininal so he can develop a rock-solid relationship between the two protagonists. In fact, the first chapter of Queer sees Lee wrestle with his feelings, attempting to uncover himself through Allerton’s unique physique and demeanor.
In that regard, Guadagnino illustrates this via elaborately intricate sex scenes that show both bodies in motion, forming a pure connection with each other until they literally and metaphorically glue themselves together near the end. The second chapter explores this relationship beginning to deteriorate (perhaps not the strongest part, but always anchored through incredible turns from Craig and Starkey), while the third and most crucial section of the movie sees Lee attempting to investigate himself through a drug promising to open his mind and telepathically communicate with himself and others.
Daniel Craig Anchors Queer's Most Challenging Parts
It’s there that most audiences have expressed their issues with how Queer wraps up, and one wouldn’t be forgiven to say so. The movie doesn’t give anyone easy answers, nor is it aimed to please audiences, unlike his last film, Challengers, which ended with a thrilling point-of-view shot of the tennis ball swerving around the court. However, the final chapter (and epilogue) of Queer showcases what Guadagnino wants to depict head-on in a far more digestible (albeit surreal) light than its first two. And it’s Craig who gives this pure shift from hopeful (lonely) romantic to a nihilist addict who realizes that no matter who he loves and who (few) love him, his life will end in total emptiness, alone, with no one to share it with.
There are obvious visual cues that prime audiences with this inextricable fact (such as Lee going to space during his Ayahuasca trip, a vast, empty landscape filled with endless stars and galaxies), and then are opened up inside a final scene that confronts us with its central thesis. It seems like a challenge because Guadagnino (and, by extension, Mukdeeprom) constantly distort the notion of space and time.
However, Craig always comes out on top and informs us how we should approach his protagonist and his longing desires for a better, more meaningful life that will sadly never arrive and never materialize. He gives a performance of rare emotional complexity, the likes of which we’ve never seen before, and a complete reversal of the suave demeanor with which he charmed audiences as James Bond. In Queer, his attractive physicality swoons other potential male lovers, but his sunken, devastated eyes betray him. He can break down at any moment, and the audience would feel as pitied as he is.
It’s this anchor that solidifies Queer as another daring work of art from Guadagnino, but it may be his most psychologically challenging film yet. To be honest, it may also be the decade’s (current) best queer film, representing an unsatiable sense of desire and lust unlike few filmmakers ever captured. Guadagnino also transcends the cold, emotionless textures of Call Me By Your Name by presenting a protagonist who cannot be sympathized with but must be observed and listened to in his quest for yearning. As a result, the emotional attachment always runs high, making the eventual eroticism feel more tragic and heavy than the constant state of pleasure of Challengers.
Final thoughts on Queer
For those who are expecting a movie in the same vein as Guadagnino’s 2017 Oscar-nominated feature, Queer may not be your cup of tea. It could also be his most uncommercial, inaccessible picture that challenges as much as it stimulates. It’s a complex, boldly ambitious proposition that attempts to make sense out of Burroughs but knows it can’t, and won’t, extract all of its significance. It’s futile to make too much sense of it when Burroughs himself leaves as much room for analysis as does Guadagnino. Watching it literally is also a futile effort, since one will never meet the movie at its terms.
Originally, the movie clocked in at a whopping three hours, which could have delivered a far more profound understanding of Lee’s anguish. Some scenes may feel too rushed or underdeveloped due to the trimming of 65 minutes of the movie. However, we still have one of the most psychologically active and audacious films of the year and one that will ruminate in your mind much longer than you think it’s going to.
Queer releases in select theatres on November 27. It will have a wide release on December 13.