In the opening shots of Luca Guadagnino's Queer, the camera observes numerous artifacts of the film's ensuing romance; two pairs of spectacles, two suitcases, two passports, clothes lazily folded, revolvers laid in a diagonal row, a camera, a typewriter, and a centipede wending its way across the cigarette-burned mattress beneath. Finally, we see a page bearing the opening lines of William S. Burroughs's novella of the same name, the letters sloppy, the ink faded, the words overlapping and overwritten.
At face value, it's an acknowledgement of the nakedly autobiographical nature of Burroughs's baffling source text, which opens with a serpentine confessional and then harrowingly fictionalizes his all-too-real obsession with an elusive young man. However, this sly twist on the storybook opening — which distorts our entrance to the film's otherwise immaculate and visually concise world — also doubles as an acceptance of the inherent tension, and inevitable shortcomings, of putting this infamous author's scabrously self-immolating prose on screen.
Queer follows the American expat William Lee (Daniel Craig), who haunts the bars of 1950s Mexico City, hopelessly in thrall to the whims of his aging flesh — booze, boys and heroin, to name a few. His immersion in the city's illicit subculture of moneyed queens and the locals they use for sex is disrupted by the entrance of Allerton (Drew Starkey), whose freeze-dried beauty and graceful aloofness ensnare the older man's affections.
Though it's (quite intentionally) a total 180 from his pulse-pounding sports melodrama Challengers earlier this year, Queer's premise seems to fit Guadagnino's ever-expanding catalogue of lust and longing to a tee. It's a handsome, sensuous and virtuosic production, staged with all of the shrewdness and care that Guadagnino has in his system, but the question lingers: should this tortured tale of ugliness and vulnerability be "handsome"?
Anyone familiar with Burroughs was sure to raise an eyebrow when his book was selected for adaptation by Hollywood's favourite Italian auteur, whose lush and playful style splits the difference between pretension and populism to frequently frustrating ends. Queer's bewildering and beguiling frames collapse the space between Edward Hopper and Nirvana (very often literally) as characters move through bustling yet desolate Cinecittà Studio backlots, which the crew have faithfully slathered in the grungy textures that befit the setting. The film is pristine, but never sterile, caught between the decay of its narrative and the luminosity of its frames (Craig and Starkey vividly embody these respective poles, transforming this conceptual stalemate into a tactile tug-of-war).
Guadagnino, in a piece he wrote for World of Interiors, made a mission statement of sorts about his soundstage of Mexico City, whose artifice and grime reflect his protagonist's sordid and fantastical consciousness: he claims (perhaps disingenuously) that this deliberately artificial place is a "projection of the author's total imagination," attributing this consciousness to Burroughs, rather than Lee. Whether Guadagnino's reach exceeds his grasp seems somewhat beside the point here, since any film adaptation would need to fundamentally alter Queer in order to chart its frenzied psychology onto a narrative with proper progression and flow.
Speaking of propriety (and progress), it would also be impossible to faithfully capture the unvarnished depths of William Lee's conscience without bogging the film down with racist monologues and pedophilic reveries. On the page, Lee is a walking, talking hyperbole of every evil impulse that flashed through the author's mind, and the intimacy the reader shares with this internal rot is the book's most complex and harrowing through line (for better or worse); readers are held hostage by him both emotionally and circumstantially, just like Allerton.
Justin Kuritzkes's screenplay distances us from Lee, allowing his inner world to be painted in abstract terms by Guadagnino and director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeepdrom (one of the best in the biz). Craig's justly lauded performance is where all of the character's opacities find purchase, lending a raw humanity to someone who exists in states of pure abjection.
While Burroughs's interests lay within the intersection of pleasure and pain, sex and control, Guadagnino's film has retooled these anxieties, emerging with a fittingly self-aware (but rarely self-effacing) film about putting the darkest corners of your soul on a platter for all to see. Unlike Burroughs, Guadagnino's soul doesn't seem to contain all that much darkness, but his take on Queer is so swoony and stylish that it's hard to care. It's packed with the kind of grand, goofy swings that people who've lost their heads over something they love often take, and its dedication to the carnal never comes at the expense of the cerebral.
Lee's desperate and frequently degrading pursuit of whatever scraps of affection the capricious Allerton can offer grates against his belief that he's entitled to them; "I want to talk to you without speaking," he tells his junior, sparking a jungle quest for a telepathy drug that heralds a deeper search for unfettered access to someone else's thoughts and feelings (another form of control). Guadagnino allows the image of the two men merging together mid-trip to be both romantic and unsettling in equal measure, suggesting an understanding of Burroughs's book and also a willingness to make it his own.
In this sense, Queer's contradictions are inseparable from its achievements. In trying to inhabit the mind and spirit of another artist, Guadagnino has revealed a great deal about himself — a fitting, failed marriage whose eventual dissolution makes the romance it depicts all the richer.