Queer

To use the word “queer” in its other meaning, this film is a queer fit for Luca Guadagnino. William Burroughs had a grimy, in-your-face sensibility that is just about as far removed from Guadagnino’s sensual, sometimes downright demure, approach to material like Call Me By Your Name as the Earth is from Mars. Take for example, this line from Burroughs’ introduction to the book: “People would shit all over the street, then lie down and sleep in it with the flies crawling in and out of their mouths.” It’s all a very long way from the stylised world that Guadagnino creates for his film, which has a polished, you’ve-just-stepped-onto-the-set-of-a-musical quality. Mind you, in 2024, musicals do seem to be making a comeback, so perhaps he is giving people what they want in that regard.

The setting, if you can get past the deliberate air of unbelievability about the place, is Mexico City, where heroin addict William Lee (Burrough’s alter ego, here played by Daniel Craig), is trying to stay clean, channelling his energies instead into drinking and as much debauchery as possible. In the middle of this, he catches sight of bright young thing Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), clean of cut and ambiguous of sexuality, and is set on a course of unrequited love that ultimately also involves financial arrangements and a trippy trip to Ecuador.

While I admire Craig for taking on this role in stark contrast to James Bond, both his look and his portrayal are also, in many ways, in stark contrast to Burroughs. Craig, in short, is still pretty buff and sporting the type of six pack that takes work rather than the sort of heroin works long employed by the writer. His Lee is also an amped and camped up version of his Knives Out Benoit Blanc. Triggered no doubt by the name, I couldn’t help wondering what Benoît Magimel - so terrific in his own white linen suited portrayal of loucheness in Pacifiction - might have made of the part. The acting standout in the film is Jason Schwartzmann in a fat suit, channelling Allen Ginsberg, as one of Lee’s mates.

The problems run deeper than casting, and come back to that air of unbelievability. The chemistry between Allerton and Craig just doesn’t feel right and that’s before we get to Guadagnino’s insistence of having cameras drift to looking out of windows when people have sex - it’s less egregious here than it was in Call Me By Your Name, and at least he does take a more frank approach to it general.

There’s also an emperor’s new clothes feeling to the general style, look closely and there's very little there. The director uses anachronous music including Nirvana’s Come As You Are and Sinead O’Connor’s All Apologies but where some directors (Baz Luhrmann, Sophia Coppola) have an aptitude for making this forge deeper connections, here the tracks feel like signposts to nowhere. The same goes for a lot of the Burroughs paraphernalia that’s included - millipedes, guns (though any reference to the fact Burroughs was in Mexico because he’d killed his partner is shorn away) - all feel as though Guadagnino just wants to tick a box and move on.

The director - and writer Justin Kuritzkes, who surely shares the blame - add meandering to dull in the film’s second half as Lee pays Allerton to go with him on a hunt for ayahuasca in the jungle. There, they find Lesley Manville, chewing the scenery, and indulge in the sort of psychedelic sequence that has gone out of vogue for a reason. All those stylised flourishes may be trying to suggest “deep and meaningful” but the further you step into Queer, the shallower it becomes.