QUEER

TWO AND A HALF STARS Down Mexico way, William Lee has become infatuated with a young serviceman.

DRAMA ITALY/US English #QUEER Starring Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey

Filming any story by William Burroughs is going to be a challenge. Gus Van Sant succeeded with DRUGSTORE COWBOY, David Cronenburg excited audiences with NAKED LUNCH. Yet for every hit there are oh so many that slipped into the long night, never to be seen or heard of again. Thus tackling Burroughs’ autobiographical Queer (written in 1952, published in 1985), a self conscious love story and semi-comic fantasy grotesque, would be a risky endeavour. Yet it was one that director Luca Guadagnino (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME) was willing to wrestle, with Daniel Craig on board as Burroughs' alter-ego William Lee. 

Middle-aged American Lee is a part-time junkie and full-time drinker who makes his money go further in Mexico. He lives a small life with other white, gay men who are avoiding persecution (social, financial, emotional) at home. It’s the kind of sharp, fetid place where everyone knows, and has had, everyone. Distraction is typically found in the company of Mexican rent boys. So when a much younger, somewhat aloof but very attractive ex-navy serviceman arrives in town, eyes turn, none more so than Lee’s. Besotted, he pursues Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) with mixed results. 

There’s an undeniable oddness to QUEER which might suit the source material - NAKED LUNCH was nothing if not odd - yet places the audience in an unenviable position: distracted and at arms length from the film’s emotional heart. And if there’s anything that Burroughs is not, it’s distant. Famously forthright, his Queer is a sweaty, grimy story overrun with chaos and gloom and disease. Guadagnino’s QUEER is a neat and clean and strangely stylised composite of how Hollywood once viewed the exotic (anywhere south of the border basically). It’s charmingly odd. Oddly synthetic. 

With a first act that brings Lee and Allerton into orbit, albeit one where the pull of obsession is heavily weighted to the older man, Guadagnino builds an interesting (if plasticised) world. Their affair begins, the sex is cinematically chaste, the stakes rise and Craig interprets Lee with eye-catching commitment. Then the tide turns as the pair head south to Ecuador - Lee wants to learn more about the psychedelic qualities of ayahuasca which requires a journey into the heart of darkness.

There’s something of what you might expect from Burroughs by the time we reach the jungle - a retina-scorching fever dream from far beyond the edge. It’s hot and sweaty, the keeper of the drug’s truth is clearly mad, spectral images of a snake eating its own body or crawling centipedes serve to emphasise the crazed minds. What is real and what is an hallucination only Burrough’s seems to know. It’s not clear that Guadagnino does. We certainly don’t.

By the film’s end we’ve learned nothing we hadn’t gleaned right at the start; Lee is a lonely, desperate man seeking company. While we’ve seen Lee’s outer world and seen into his imaginary world, we’ve seen nothing of his inner world. Despite Craig’s best efforts, the script gives him (and therefore us) no insight as to why Lee’s so lonely, so desperate, so isolated, so isolating. For all its off-kilter, AI-stylings and conscious panache, QUEER is a strangely hollow experience that has only questions, no answers.

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