Many, many directors simply could not get away with the flights of fancy which Luca Guadagnino seems to just toss off as if they were destined to happen and destined to succeed, no matter how strange they might have seemed on paper. Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) comes across so confident in all of his films, like he’s a quarterback who can consistently complete off-platform passes from any arm angle. That mix of confidence and skill works wonders in Queer, a William S. Burroughs adaptation from Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. This second collaboration between Guadagnino and Kuritzkes yields perhaps Guadagnino’s best film yet, and coming from a Guadagnino super-fan like me, that is really saying something.
We follow William Lee (Daniel Craig), a late-forties American expat in 1950s Mexico City. He finds some sense of community in a small enclave of expat gay men like himself, but more meaningful passions are stirred when he meets Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a young student who’s new in town. Eugene is impossibly handsome, mysterious to a fault, and matches William’s overly verbose wit with small jabs of his own. Eugene seems attracted to William as well, but along with the mystery of this young man come insecurities. Eugene is not always willing to fully embrace his sexual identity and just be himself, whereas William’s openness sometimes reads as a cry for help, especially when we learn the extent of his drug addiction later on. Theirs is a confused sort of love affair. As the title character of Todd Haynes’ Carol (a queer cinema masterpiece with which Queer ranks) might say, both of these men are “flung out of space.”
The tragedy here is that both William and Eugene, while vastly different in a number of ways, could actually help each other in life under better circumstances. Though he can sometimes be cold due to his own insecurities, Eugene does truly care about William. He takes him to see a doctor when he’s going through intense withdrawals, but there is this unearned cavalierness about William which clearly wounds Eugene. The sex scenes between them are so beyond what most filmmakers are capable of with any kind of sex in terms of storytelling. We are made precisely, sometimes painfully aware of continuing character dynamics as the most passionate moments play out. Those moments are as layered and textural as anything else in this beautiful, beautiful film.
Queer’s beauty shines in its sophisticated balance. Guadagnino and Kuritzkes flit between the hilarious, the heartbreaking, the seedy, and the psychological in such nicely mannered ways all throughout the film. This includes those unforgettable flights of fancy I referenced earlier. There are several dream sequences and several dream-like sequences, each of which add emotional context while being vague enough to be debated and pondered after the credits roll. Other flights of fancy include song choices in the film’s soundtrack. The film opens with a gentle cover of a song from a certain iconic grunge band, and not much later, one of the best scenes in the entire film plays out over another song from that same band, this time using the original version. This bold choice pays off, because the iconoclastic choice to use more contemporary music throughout this 50s period piece gives it a mood all its own, and especially informs us as to William’s mood and thought process. That’s all before we get to the wonderful score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which hits like touches of Magic-Kingdom fantasy at all the right times.
Of course, so much of this wouldn’t work without a stellar cast. This is undoubtedly Daniel Craig’s best performance yet. He gives such texture to all the minutiae of William; all his eccentricities give us peeks behind the curtain of his farcical facade. As Eugene, Drew Starkey’s work is necessarily more subtle, but can’t be taken for granted. What Eugene withholds is always more important than what he shares openly, and although we get fewer peeks behind his curtain, those peeks are just as fascinating as anything else in the film. Another of Guadagnino’s bold choices is to cast a certain recognizable comedic character actor in a role which requires heavy makeup. I don’t want to fully spoil that surprise, because it’s one of those eccentric choices Guadagnino makes which is fun to discuss afterwards, but suffice it to say that that actor also makes his presence felt, and not only as comic relief.
All things considered, watching Queer is like reading a great novel. It can sometimes seem aimless in the amount of detail provided, but you soon realize that everything is there for a purpose. Readers and watchers are meant to be transported to a time, place, and mood. If any film did that this year, Queer did. | George Napper
