There are many of us who, whether or not we’d like to admit, watched director Luca Guadagnino’s gorgeously erotic coming-of-age gay love story Call Me By Your Name, started to get hot and bothered when the film’s big sex scene started, and then, when the camera cut to the window just as things started to get explicit, groaned, “C’mon!!!”
Those exasperated shouts must have been loud and frequent, because Guadagnino seems to be cheekily addressing them in his new film Queer, which just debuted to raves—and throbbing libidos—at the Venice Film Festival.
Queer is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel, written in the ’50s but not published until 1985, about a junkie expat named Bill Lee (Daniel Craig) living in Mexico City chasing the high of hard drugs and sex with the hard-bodied men he encounters—especially Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a handsome Navy serviceman from Florida.
Lee confides in Allerton that he is a homosexual, and invites him on a trip to South America, where he wants to learn more about an ayahuasca plant that supposedly gives its imbiber telepathic powers. That’s one goal of the journey; the other is to have Allerton all to himself, a translation of his addiction to drugs to an addiction to a man.
Craig’s performance has gotten rave reviews from the critics who screened the film in Venice, calling it heartbreaking, dedicated, and the best work of the Bond star’s career. And, while Craig’s acting is getting loads of attention, the hosannas are being eclipsed by the surprise—pleasant surprise, to be clear—over how explicit the film’s sex scenes are.
“QUEER: Well, Luca definitely doesn’t pan to a window this time,” The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan posted on X. “OK, I lied: He actually does pan to a window during one sex scene… then cuts back to the f---ing like ‘psych!’”
Indiewire’s Ryan Lattanzio wrote that the film has “the most explicit gay sex scenes I can remember in any mainstream movie—if Queer is that at all.” He also teased that pop star Omar Apollo, who appears in the film as one of Lee’s hookups, has a full-frontal nude scene in the film.
The panning to the window critique—and the way in which Guadagnino seems to address it—is discussed in several of the reviews.
“That Guadagnino briefly pans out a window during both [sex scenes], only to cut back to the lovers to find them going at it even harder than before, could suggest the filmmaker is trolling critics of the controversially coyer sex scene in Call Me By Your Name, which panned to a tree outside the bedroom of an Italian villa as Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer started going at it,” Lattanzio wrote. “But I think that’s just Guadagnino’s playfully teasing style, often abruptly digressive in a film’s most sensual or visceral moments, only to yank us back into the primality of it all.”
The BBC’s Nicholas Barber opened his review with the similar observation:
“When Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name came out in 2017, the director was criticized for the coyness of the two male lovers' sex scenes. Even the film's screenwriter, James Ivory, argued that Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer's naked bodies should have been on show. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘that’s a more natural way of doing things than to hide them, or to do what Luca did, which is to pan the camera out of the window toward some trees.’ Evidently, Guadagnino bore those words in mind when he was making Queer, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, because when Daniel Craig goes to bed with a man, their coupling is shown from enthusiastic start to explosive finish. Anyone who enjoyed seeing Craig striding out of the ocean in his swimming trunks in Casino Royale will be in for a treat.”
And should you have any doubt that the scenes actually are that provocative, the contrarian audience, as Buchanan reported from Venice, is already speaking up: “Loud boos after the Venice press screening of QUEER came from the guy sitting next to me, who audibly groaned or muttered "Oh God" during every gay sex scene”
