Queer draws us into Luca Guadagnino’s world of desire. It’s Mexico City in the Fifties, and we’ve settled among a collective of outcast American expats, moneyed enough that they can go in search of paradise. Sticky red motel corridors are brushed by the lights of neon signage, the air heavy with casual sex, which seems to rush by with an exhale of breath – intimate, explicit, but somehow elusive. Outside, the night sky looks like spilled ink, like it does in Douglas Sirk’s technicolour masterpieces of the midcentury.
Guadagnino has followed up this year’s triumphant tennis drama Challengers with a film that would seem miles apart, yet treats desire equally as a kind of supernatural possession. It’s often frightening in his work, because its victims are always left with their hearts exposed, an image he treats literally here as he did in his 2018 horror remake Suspiria, and its climactic display of a woman tearing open her own rib cage.
Queer’s landscape is unsettled yet beautiful; through it trudges Daniel Craig’s William Lee, alter ego of the postmodernist William S Burroughs, who wrote the film’s source novel. Lee has disassociated to the degree that he’s started to fade from our view. The film catches him disappearing like an image into television static. Guadagnino even throws in the odd, anachronistic track – Nirvana’s “Come as You Are”, or Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” – to echo his displacement. He’s in the wrong time, in the wrong place.
Burroughs wrote his novella in 1952, as an extension to his debut Junkie, and shortly after he’d shot dead his wife Joan Vollmer, in what he’d come to claim was an accidental discharge of his handgun. It’s a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author’s life.
“I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,” is the line repeatedly echoed across Queer, and largely by Craig’s protagonist. He’s dressed in crisp linen, and makes niceties with the teasing, confrontational air of the actor’s Bond. Yet he carries with him a bitter dissatisfaction that threatens to puff him up like a balloon and, eventually, pop, hastened when he encounters a young American ex-serviceman, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Starkey, a lead on Netflix’s Outer Banks, plays Allerton like a statue come to life. He’s Lee’s own frustrated Pygmalion, who’s walked right out of his fantasies but remains ultimately unknowable. At times, the film layers images, so that Lee’s ghostly hand will stretch out to try and caress Allerton’s hands and ribs, to possess him in some way.
They have sex. He invites him on a trip to South America. Allerton holds him while he shivers and whimpers through heroin withdrawal. Lee is obsessed by the idea of telepathy, and leads the pair into the Ecuadorian jungle to seek out a Dr Cotter. As played by Lesley Manville in a greasy wig, blackened teeth, and with the hard-bitten delivery of a saloon owner, she’s such a giddily unromantic character that it’s as if she’s the final warning post before Lee is utterly lost to his delusions. But he ignores her advice, takes “yagé” (otherwise known as ayahuasca), and Queer melts fully into the beat generation realm of raw mythicism.
But its conclusion, in a way, echoes the final scene of Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017), which rests on Timothée Chalamet, eyes fixed on the fireplace, cheeks wet and soul hollow. As his character’s father has cautioned him, “Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot.” Queer seeks out that lonely place and lets us fester in it.
Dir: Luca Guadagnino. Starring: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, Lesley Manville. Cert 18, 137 mins
‘Queer’ is in cinemas from 13 December
