NATHAN WEINBENDER:
On one of their first dates, Lee and Allerton go to the movies and see Jean Cocteau’s masterpiece Orpheus, a dreamlike, beatnik interpretation of the Greek myth about the poet following his lover into the underworld. It’s a typically self-reflexive moment in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, a film that is, like its characters (and the characters in Orpheus), unstuck in time. Its reality is porous, its soundtrack is anachronistic, and its tragic hero has, before the movie even starts, passed into a different realm of consciousness. And his lover follows.
Lee (Daniel Craig, who has never been better) is a disaffected American haunting the coffee shops and bars of 1950s Mexico City, part of a community of fellow gay expats and outcasts. He wanders around in a haze of tequila, cigarette smoke, heroin and one-night stands, in a rumpled, sweat-stained linen suit that practically becomes his uniform.
One night he locks eyes with Allerton (Drew Starkey), a younger GI who is slow to reciprocate Lee’s advances. But he does, and soon they’re at each other’s sides all the time, though Allerton regards Lee like an overeager puppy dog he’s been ordered to care for.
Allerton himself is complicated in that he doesn’t consider himself a homosexual and doesn’t seem to relate to Lee’s desire. He’s also an avatar for 1950s conformity—stiff, clean-cut, repressed—a blank upon which Lee can project his voracious needs, and he sometimes tortures Lee with aloofness and even cruelty in the long periods between their intense sexual encounters. Of course, Lee is an impossible man to love: slurred by drugs and drink, convinced he’s telekinetic, obsessed with the idea of doing ayahuasca in the jungle.
Much of this is taken from a semi-autobiographical novella by William S. Burroughs, who was less concerned with the logical order of words than how they sounded together. Queer is only the second major screen adaptation of his famously difficult work, following David Cronenberg’s droll, disgusting 1991 film Naked Lunch. Both films share dialogue passages and visual motifs, and they both merge their plots with details from Burroughs’s life, including references to his indictment in the death of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer.
Guadagnino’s film is perhaps a more accurate approximation of Burroughs’ freewheeling style, but it is no less alienating and idiosyncratic than Cronenberg’s. It is, unsurprisingly, a film of bold, even reckless aesthetic choices. Guadagnino and his regular cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom conjure images that confuse, startle, titillate, disturb. A key image is of bodies entwined; at one point, they melt into one another, which is one of the most potent visual approximations of physical intimacy I’ve seen.
Queer feels less like a follow-up to Naked Lunch than to Guadagnino’s own 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, another story of a relationship that’s doomed from the beginning. If this doesn’t reach the heights of that earlier movie, it’s because Guadagnino has designed it to keep us at an emotional remove from its characters, who are swallowed up by his beguiling images.
But it works as a film about sensation and touch, about experiences both carnal and out-of-body, and about desires so all-consuming that these men willingly leave the real world behind—not that the real world wanted them, anyway.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.
