Luca Guadagnino’s newest film, Queer, follows William Lee (Daniel Craig), an American expat wandering the streets of Mexico City, oscillating between getting very drunk and looking for trade. His disposition rubs people the wrong way (both because of his queerness and the things that he says), with only one true friend, Joe (Jason Schwartzman). After locking eyes with a passing young GI, Eugene “Gene” Allerton (Drew Starkey), Lee becomes completely infatuated. So begins the cat-and-mouse game of desire, where Lee continues to question, “is he queer?” Allerton pulls him in and pushes him away, providing a complex and confusingly elusive relationship.
After Lee’s steamy first night with Allerton, he tries to adapt to each pushback. If Gene doesn’t match his eye contact, he’ll increase his voice or tell a horrifying story to elicit a chuckle. He’s not only addicted to heroin, but to any attention from Allerton, doing more and more just to score anything, including a pursuit to South America in search of “Yage,” a drug that will supposedly grant mind-reading capabilities. He delves deeper and deeper into the jungle and further inside of himself.
The film is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s book of the same name, the middle of a so-called trilogy including Junky, Queer, and The Yage Diaries, all of which follow the character of William Lee. While the manuscript for the book was written in 1953, it wasn’t until 1985 before it was finally edited together and published, clearly showing the fragmented nature of its construction. Guadagnino embraces these scissions, using them as moments of clarity to show bits of Burroughs’s own self buried into the text.
The character of William Lee is a metafiction for the writer: a heroin addict struggling to grapple with his self-hatred as a homosexual and escaping his past transgressions. Burroughs himself was also chasing a young man named Lewis Marker, ending his pursuit only after a half dozen of his letters went unanswered. Even when Junky was first sent to Burroughs’s publisher, it was under the name William Lee. He wrote in the Appendix of the novel, “I feel that I was being written in Queer.”
In 1953, the writer was also living in Mexico City, escaping a drug charge from New Orleans. Just a year prior, his wife (yes, he was a homosexual with a wife) goaded him into shooting a glass off of her head to test his skill as a marksman. He failed. Guadagnino’s adaptation invites speculation about how much of the film’s William Lee is Burroughs’s character from the novella and how much is Burroughs himself, written in the wake of his own personal tragedy and unfurrowing. If Burroughs’s Queer is described as an exorcism, Guadagnino’s is a haunting.
The film begins with typewritten papers strung about a bed, some folded into objects: a house, a box. Only a few are decipherable, including the line “Lee turned his attention to a Jewish boy named Carl,” which also serves as the first line in the book. Guadagnino has adapted multiple books (Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All) as well as other films (A Bigger Splash, Suspiria), but constructs levels of containment here, outlining what is being adapted and what is informed by moments outside of the page. And while the film on the surface is “about” the relationship between Lee and Allerton, much of Gene’s interiority is completely indecipherable, making William’s longing even more desperate. Phantom gestures haunt many scenes, with romantic desire too bold for Lee. The wandering sadness of loss permeates, with Allerton manifesting as this hopeful illusion of escapism that will never materialize. Queer is concerned with loneliness and desire, but the latter here is a mechanism for Lee to escape the former, as he descends into obsession in hopes to lose his path back.
It’s a task to adapt any work by Burroughs; his writing slips between the mundane and grotesque with snarling characters and an air of repugnance. Its brilliance comes from the reader’s personal conjurings, which limits the literal visual adaptations they can be in a film. Yet Guadagnino circumvents this. Queer is strangely beautiful, containing less ugliness while preserving the emotions centered in the story. Scenes are draped in beautiful sunset colors captured by his now frequent cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, paired with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s melancholic score (almost polar to their work on Challengers earlier this year). There’s a softness to Guadagnino’s Queer, removing some of the venom to highlight the isolation that percolates every corner of each hotel room and bar. He merges sensational sensibilities (featuring a fully nude Omar Apollo and graphic climax scenes rarely allowed in widely-released films) with a listless sorrow, as Craig’s Lee collapses in on himself.
Mirrors are a constant theme throughout, referenced on the silver screen as the two leads watch Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus and when a local tells Lee that the Yage he so desperately seeks acts as a mirror to one’s own self. Lee and Allerton struggle to see themselves, pulling away from forms of intimacy or even away from moments of stasis. The film itself acts as a mirror too, reflecting a sense of wistfulness that many queer people relate to, chasing love in the hope that one-sided passion can convince the other person that they are enough. Lee hallucinating the line, “I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,” plays almost comically as a gesture of heroin-induced delusions. But this sentiment haunts the rest of the film, suggesting that he must leave his body in search of anywhere else to go. Bodies become phantoms of their past selves, trying to remember who they’re supposed to be, if anything at all. Guadagnino adds his own ending, one that leaves a sense of finality to the character of William Lee. While it may not be a warm revelation for him, Guadagnino gives him the peace Burroughs couldn’t.
Queer is in theaters now.
