TORONTO, Canada—Heady, consuming, obsessive love is Luca Guadagnino’s specialty, and he plumbs it once more with Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ 1985 novel about an American junkie in 1940s Mexico City who falls hard for a younger stranger.
Hallucinatory and grimy, the Call Me by Your Name and Challengers director’s latest is a romance set inside an addiction nightmare, and at its core is Daniel Craig, delivering a fearsomely raw, vulnerable turn as a man who’s lost and alone, split into pieces, and gripped by a hunger he can’t control. The film may be as fragmented as its protagonist and, ultimately, unable to reconcile its disparate facets, but its headliner’s portrait of desire, degradation, and delirium is a sight to behold—and the performance of his career.
William Lee (Craig) is a dashing mess from the moment we meet him questioning a potential paramour. “You’re a queer?” are his initial words and a sign of the war raging inside him, since Lee likes to deny that he’s a homosexual and yet lives as an out-and-unashamed one.
Dressed in a stylish white suit, snappy hat, and clear prescription glasses, a gun holstered on his hip, he’s an expat who moves through his adopted metropolis like a native. In a later monologue, Lee will more fully voice his conflicted feelings about his gay “condition.” However, from the start, he radiates a mixture of confidence and reticence, brashness and shame, and walking through the streets, his life changes when he spies a group of men cheering on a cockfight and, just past them, a cock that he will fight mightily to possess.
Eugene Allerton (newcomer Drew Starkey) is an all-American looker—his hair neatly combed, his striped polo shirt tucked into his khaki pants—and for Lee, it’s love at first sight. Just as he’s torn between who he is and who he imagines himself to be, Lee feels amour but knows only lust, and when he’s unable to pick up Allerton, he settles for a Mexican playboy whom he takes to a local motel where the hallways are red and the manager leaves a fresh towel for his one-night-stand customers.
Lee’s subsequent attempt to catch Allerton’s eye goes better, and they slowly develop a rapport in and out of Lee’s favorite hangout, Ship Ahoy, where he spends his days downing tequila shots either alone or alongside his randy friend Joe (an amusingly candid Jason Schwartzman), who’s constantly being robbed by the lovers he brings home.
Despite visiting Ship Ahoy in the company of a female friend (Andra Ursuta), Allerton isn’t totally shy about his interest in men, and he soon warms to Lee’s clumsy enticements. Whether sloshed or sober, Lee behaves like a nervous schoolkid with a crush, all awkward gestures and embarrassed expressions, and Guadagnino artfully visualizes his longing for the hunk via two separate shots in which Lee’s thoughts manifest themselves in ghostly form.
Even once he gets Allerton back to his place, Lee is reticent, albeit not enough to resist getting into bed with him. Queer doesn’t hold back in its sex scenes, and neither does Craig, who embodies the protagonist—whom Burroughs based on himself—as a lovestruck fiend who’s discovered a new, irresistible drug.
Unfortunately, Lee is also hooked on his own standby, heroin, and Queer peaks with a protracted single-take of him cooking smack, injecting it into his arm, and smoking a cigarette and taking swigs of his beer, a look of profound weariness and vacancy in his eyes. Craig’s stare speaks volumes about the numbing, corroding depths of his character’s habit, such that the longer Guadagnino’s camera lingers on his face, the more the actor reveals about Lee’s bruised and battered heart.
When Allerton begins casually rejecting him, Lee falls into despair, and when Lee eventually convinces the man to travel with him to South America, he becomes (figuratively) high as a kite. Their vacation, alas, is marked by chronic substance abuse and severe dope sickness, further emboldening Lee to accomplish the task that brought him here in the first place: finding yage, otherwise known as ayahuasca, which he believes bestows users with the power of telepathy.
Lee craves understanding, connection, and unity, and he seeks it in the thick jungles, where he locates the greasy, eyebrow-less Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), who’s doing research with yage and facilitates Lee and Allerton’s use of it.
Warned that it’s no traditional narcotic (it’s described as a “mirror”), the two consume the natural psychedelic and embark on a surrealistic trip that climaxes with their bodies melding together in a symbiotic embrace. As with Lee’s occasional dreams, Guadagnino embellishes this sequence with some of his many recurring motifs, lending the action—whose early going features artificial backdrops and an animated shot of a plane taking flight—an escalating unreality.
In its latter half, Queer sets aside Lee and Allerton’s tangled relationship for a darker investigation of the former’s soul, but the film (written by Justin Kuritzkes) gradually loses its urgency, ruled as it is by Lee’s mounting mania. It also sabotages whatever shaky equilibrium it previously possessed; once the tale’s focal point, Starkey’s Allerton is rendered merely a silent supporting partner, there to usher Lee along on his voyage into the heart of darkness.
This too is deliberate, yet in dramatic terms, it unbalances the proceedings. Manville’s scenery chewing as a physician who’s intensely paranoid that someone might come to steal her yage research (her home is protected by a trained viper!) is entertainingly unhinged—and reminiscent of Mark Rylance’s Bones & All baddie—but Lee and Allerton’s jungle adventure affords diminishing returns.
Split into three chapters and an epilogue, Queer boasts a bit of Beat spirit, and its concluding moments daringly strive (with some success) to evoke Lee’s guilt, regret, and sadness by channeling Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Still, Guadagnino remains a director who—no matter his frequent interest in horror—is most comfortable when exploring the ins and outs of romantic need and yearning, and the further he strays from that subject, the wobblier and more mannered his work becomes. In this case, at least, he has Craig to save the day, burrowing so deeply into Lee’s inner chaos that he singlehandedly keeps the film on its desolate track.
