Queer review – Bur­roughs would be proud

The first time that las­civ­i­ous racon­teur William Lee (Daniel Craig) notices Eugene Aller­ton (Drew Starkey), he’s watch­ing a group of men bar­ter­ing over a cock­fight in the street. Aller­ton emerges from a bar, clean-cut, feline, mov­ing in slow motion in the heat of the Mex­i­can night – for Lee, it’s like the whole world just shift­ed on its axis. Luca Guadagnino’s anachro­nis­tic deci­sion to set this piv­otal moment in Queer to Nirvana’s ​‘Come As You Are’ speaks to his per­pet­u­al­ly provoca­tive sen­si­bil­i­ties, but the will­ful oblit­er­a­tion of peri­od detail is not an emp­ty gesture.

The film fea­tures two oth­er Nir­vana songs on its sound­track (Marigold and Sinead O’Connor’s cov­er of All Apolo­gies) as well as two Prince tracks (17 Days and Musi­col­o­gy). Who bet­ter to sound­track a film about the all-encom­pass­ing nature of desire than two men who wrote some of the great­est music about it, and them­selves were no strangers to con­stant spec­u­la­tion about their gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty and drug use?

While work­ing with screen­writer Justin Kuritzkes on Chal­lengers, Guadagni­no tapped him to adapt Bur­roughs’ short nov­el about an Amer­i­can writer hold­ing court down in Mex­i­co who becomes obsessed with a beau­ti­ful young army vet­er­an. The source mate­r­i­al plays to both their strengths; Chal­lengers was a film about obses­sion and want­i­ng what you can’t have (recur­ring themes through­out Guadagnino’s fil­mog­ra­phy). Yet Bur­roughs is a tricky cus­tomer, and there are very few suc­cess­ful adap­ta­tions of his work; Beat work gen­er­al­ly doesn’t tend to trans­late so well to screen (guilty as charged, On The Road and Howl).

Guadagni­no cer­tain­ly employs more fan­tas­ti­cal devices in Queer than we’ve seen since Sus­piria, the most suc­cess­ful of which is a dou­ble expo­sure effect that sug­gests phan­tom moments of touch between Lee and Aller­ton, the former’s desire push­ing up against the bound­aries of his restraint. A lit­tle hard­er to swal­low is how the film han­dles the third-act trip to Ecuador, where the pair seek out the botanist Doc­tor Kot­ter (Les­ley Manville as you have lit­er­al­ly nev­er seen her before) and trip on ayahuas­ca. Drugs indeed form a core part of Bur­roughs’ mythol­o­gy, but it’s frus­trat­ing that the film con­cen­trates so much on this when there is noth­ing as tedious­ly repet­i­tive as watch­ing some­one get high.

Even so the chem­istry between Craig and Starkey smoul­ders, every ember threat­en­ing to turn into a spark, even if the shift­ing bound­aries of their rela­tion­ship feel squashed under the weight of the sec­ondary plot about Ecuado­ri­an hal­lu­cino­gens. Craig puts in a stel­lar turn as the vain, neu­rot­ic avatar for Bur­roughs, while Starkey, a rel­a­tive new­com­er, pos­sess­es a sto­ic, com­pelling charis­ma as the object of his desire. Here Aller­ton is a lit­tle more ten­der than the manip­u­la­tive youth of Bur­roughs’ book, and the sex­u­al pro­cliv­i­ties and anx­i­eties so ful­ly on dis­play in the source mate­r­i­al feel super­seded here in favour of fol­low­ing a less inter­est­ing nar­ra­tive thread.

Despite the weak­ness of Queer’s Ecuador chap­ter, it leads into a dev­as­tat­ing epi­logue that blurs the line between Bur­roughs the man and Bur­roughs the fab­ri­ca­tion, and there are often flash­es of the Guadagni­no who so rich­ly paints por­traits of aching lone­li­ness and fal­li­ble humans falling in and out of lust and love: when Lee gen­tly runs his hands across Allerton’s bare chest; when he picks up a sad-eyed Mex­i­can for a night at a seedy bar; even when he sits down at his table and method­i­cal­ly pre­pares to shoot hero­in into his veins.

Although rumours of a 3‑hour cut start­ed by Venice fes­ti­val head Alber­to Bar­bera were shut down by Guadagni­no, it’s a shame they’re untrue, because one longs to spend a lit­tle less time in the jun­gle and more nav­i­gat­ing the trans­ac­tion­al nature of Lee’s dal­liance with Aller­ton in the fac­sim­i­le of a Mex­i­can city that the direc­tor has cre­at­ed – not a place that exists in real­i­ty, but rather in Lee’s mind, where the only things to do all day are drink and talk and fuck. It’s a less straight­for­ward film than any­thing Guadagni­no has made before, and cer­tain­ly less obvi­ous in its exe­cu­tion, but per­haps that’s in the spir­it of Bur­roughs’ work, as uneven, ridicu­lous and unre­li­able as it was. Bur­roughs believed in mag­ic, and watch­ing Queer, one has an inkling that Guadagni­no does too.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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