The first time that lascivious raconteur William Lee (Daniel Craig) notices Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), he’s watching a group of men bartering over a cockfight in the street. Allerton emerges from a bar, clean-cut, feline, moving in slow motion in the heat of the Mexican night – for Lee, it’s like the whole world just shifted on its axis. Luca Guadagnino’s anachronistic decision to set this pivotal moment in Queer to Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ speaks to his perpetually provocative sensibilities, but the willful obliteration of period detail is not an empty gesture. The film features two other Nirvana songs on its soundtrack (Marigold and Sinead O’Connor’s cover of All Apologies) as well as two Prince tracks (17 Days and Musicology). Who better to soundtrack a film about the all-encompassing nature of desire than two men who wrote some of the greatest music about it, and themselves were no strangers to constant speculation about their gender, sexuality and drug use?
While working with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes on Challengers, Guadagnino tapped him to adapt Burroughs’ short novel about an American writer holding court down in Mexico who becomes obsessed with a beautiful young army veteran. The source material plays to both their strengths; Challengers was a film about obsession and wanting what you can’t have (recurring themes throughout Guadagnino’s filmography). Yet Burroughs is a tricky customer, and there are very few successful adaptations of his work; Beat work generally doesn’t tend to translate so well to screen (guilty as charged, On The Road and Howl).
Guadagnino certainly employs more fantastical devices in Queer than we’ve seen since Suspiria, the most successful of which is a double exposure effect that suggests phantom moments of touch between Lee and Allerton, the former’s desire pushing up against the boundaries of his restraint. A little harder to swallow is how the film handles the third-act trip to Ecuador, where the pair seek out the botanist Doctor Kotter (Lesley Manville as you have literally never seen her before) and trip on ayahuasca. Drugs indeed form a core part of Burroughs’ mythology, but it’s frustrating that the film concentrates so much on this when there is nothing as tediously repetitive as watching someone get high.
Even so the chemistry between Craig and Starkey smoulders, every ember threatening to turn into a spark, even if the shifting boundaries of their relationship feel squashed under the weight of the secondary plot about Ecuadorian hallucinogens. Craig puts in a stellar turn as the vain, neurotic avatar for Burroughs, while Starkey, a relative newcomer, possesses a stoic, compelling charisma as the object of his desire. Here Allerton is a little more tender than the manipulative youth of Burroughs’ book, and the sexual proclivities and anxieties so fully on display in the source material feel superseded here in favour of following a less interesting narrative thread.
Despite the weakness of Queer’s Ecuador chapter, it leads into a devastating epilogue that blurs the line between Burroughs the man and Burroughs the fabrication, and there are often flashes of the Guadagnino who so richly paints portraits of aching loneliness and fallible humans falling in and out of lust and love: when Lee gently runs his hands across Allerton’s bare chest; when he picks up a sad-eyed Mexican for a night at a seedy bar; even when he sits down at his table and methodically prepares to shoot heroin into his veins.
Although rumours of a 3-hour cut started by Venice festival head Alberto Barbera were shut down by Guadagnino, it’s a shame they’re untrue, because one longs to spend a little less time in the jungle and more navigating the transactional nature of Lee’s dalliance with Allerton in the facsimile of a Mexican city that the director has created – not a place that exists in reality, but rather in Lee’s mind, where the only things to do all day are drink and talk and fuck. It’s a less straightforward film than anything Guadagnino has made before, and certainly less obvious in its execution, but perhaps that’s in the spirit of Burroughs’ work, as uneven, ridiculous and unreliable as it was. Burroughs believed in magic, and watching Queer, one has an inkling that Guadagnino does too.
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