Don’t Look Away from ‘Queer’

A swoony-sweaty look at the uncertainty of love, Luca Guadagnino’s febrile period piece Queer is a mournful reverie for all the hapless, hopeless, feckless, reckless souls aching to connect. This raw-wound romance, chronicling a middle-aged American singleton haunting the gay bars of 1950s Mexico City, is based on a William S. Burroughs novella so piercingly confessional that the author kept it from publication for thirty years.

QUEER ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Written by: Justin Kuritzkes
Starring: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, Lesley Manville
Running time: 137 mins

That exquisite pain is on full display here, from his shame-tinged homosexuality to his restless loneliness and wracked heroin addiction all balled up together into a tight, anxious coil. And embodying it completely is Daniel Craig, the author’s alter ego William Lee, giving a startling performance in whiplash opposition to his box-office breakout as hyper-hetero alpha male James Bond. In his five-film arc as 007, Craig brought the famously louche character a brooding focus; that same emotional commitment here blossoms into a different sort of intensity, serving up a machismo that’s fragile and cracked and at times even darkly comical. But the depths Craig gives to Lee are far more profound and touching. 

His initial courtship and increasing infatuation with the lanky, smooth-skinned and far younger discharged Navy sailor Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) reveals an endearing awkwardness behind that suave, poker-faced bluster Lee projects to the rest of his friends and one-night stands—right down to the pistolero he casually hangs off his trouser belt. Allerton rattles him, partly because the former serviceman, often hanging around with a mysterious woman named Mary (Andra Ursuța), is so coy about his sexual orientation. 

It’s a marked contrast to the other men in Lee’s circle, older like him and full of catty jibes—like portly, bearded, bespectacled Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman, brilliantly bittersweet), himself such a literal victim of love that his wham-bam boy toys keep stealing things like his watch, his radio, even his boots. “He’s so queer, I’ve lost interest in him” Joe says about one potential conquest. 

That conflicted relationship with his own carnal needs permeates his and Lee’s melancholy swagger. Lee talks about the shame that accompanied his own sexual awakening, when as a younger man he found himself reluctantly aligned with the “painted, simpering female impersonators” that were society’s notion of his own desire. “Nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation,” says Lee, recalling the homophobia that he still has to navigate. “It’s nobler to die a man than to live on as a sex monster.” 

But he also remembers a word of advice that one of those “old queens” gave him. “You are part of everything that is alive,” Lee fondly recalls being told. “We’re all part of some tremendous whole.” It’s that notion that partly drives his nagging curiosity to ingest the South American yagé plant, otherwise known as ayahuasca. He’s convinced it bestows telepathy, so he convinced Allerton to come with him down to Ecuador so they can take it together. “You think it will fix things for you,” a scientist tells Lee. “Who is it you’re desperately trying to communicate with?” 

Guadagnino is a uniquely expressionistic filmmaker, especially when he’s conjuring love stories—from a bottled-up posh housewife’s infidelity in 2009’s I Am Love to the budding teenage heartache of 2017’s Call Me By Your Name. Guadagnino’s randy thruple-curious Challengers, amazingly released just a few months ago, uses striking camera angles and jolting music cues to elevate the volleying amorous tension among his three strapping tennis player horndogs. He has a thrilling way of taking realistic places and infusing them with an almost surreal level of fantasy.

With Queer, he takes that fabulist approach to a subtle extreme, shooting his dreamlike film on sets at the fabled Cinecittà Studios. Locations feel both real and imagined, whether they’re Mexican thirst-traps saloons like Lola’s and Ship Ahoy, teeming with rent-boy cruisers and moneyed ex-pats; or the deepest jungles in Ecuador, where ayahuasca trips hold the promise of existential awakenings and flesh-fusing mind-melds. The eclectic needle drops are just as out-of-time: Sinead O’Connor’s quivering cover of “All Apologies,” Prince’s deep-cut acoustic version of the B-side “17 Days,” New Order’s hypnotic “Leave Me Alone.” It all adds to the beguiling brew.

This emotionally isolated love story—an anti-romance, possibly, or maybe even a romance for the unloved—honors Burroughs’ bristling complexity. Guadagnino’s work here as a filmmaker and storyteller reveals vistas into the human heart that echo what his film’s drug sherpa Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville, wild-eyed and majestically nutty) says after she helps Lee and Allerton open the doors of perception. “Door’s already open—can’t close it now. All you can do is look away. But why would you?’