Queer is Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ autobiographical novel of the same name. Written between 1951 and 1953, yet not published until 1985, the novel follows its hero William Lee around Mexico and South America in the pursuit of love, drugs and epiphanies. Guadagnino remains faithful to the novel, though he changes one key element and adds a postscript.
The film is broken up into chapters. In the first, we meet Lee (Daniel Craig), an American author who has chosen to live in Mexico City to avoid a heroin case pending in the US. He goes from bar to bar and hotel room to hotel room, picking up local lads in the constant, voracious search for his next sexual fix. Lee is played athletically by Craig, who moves like a dancer and has a far more ripped body than a middle-aged man who is constantly sozzled on mezcal should have. He carries a gun, reads Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (what else?) and has created a life filled with friends in his new homeland. The only thing Lee apparently doesn’t do is write, despite the presence of typewriters in his apartment. He also doesn’t do heroin anymore, at least until he does.
