On Luca Guadagnino's 'Queer'

Love, Lust, & Longing

credit: A24

It is a bit of a shame that the rather gorgeous Call Me By Your Name is remembered now as much for the eccentric messages sent by Armie Hammer over Instagram and his subsequent fall from grace as it is for its heart-rending portrait of two young lovers not yet quite at ease with themselves. Invoke the Wagner Rule, I say. For it is a very moving and beautiful film that established its director, Luca Guadagnino, as something like a poet of erotic desire. His films are lavish, sensual and fraught with raw feeling. Now he has another, his second of 2024 and fourth since Call Me By Your Name made him a star.

William Lee (Daniel Craig) is American, gay, and as addicted to drugs as he is to a younger man named Eugene (Drew Starkey). Their eyes meet across a crowded street in Mexico, where a group of men are watching a cock-fight. Lee is besotted. But is Eugene? It is rather hard to tell. For Eugene is cold, detached, reserved, somehow keeping his composure even while throwing up after a mezcal too many. In a restaurant popular with the city’s expat gays, Eugene plays chess with a woman called Mary (Andra Ursuta). Is he into her? Lee frets. He frets about what this means, what Eugene wants, what Eugene thinks. Eugene is, after all, ever-so mysterious. In another film, he might be a serial killer.

This is the central thrust (so to speak) of Queer, a film adaptation of the William Burroughs novel. In Mexico City in the 1950s, Lee, a man based not so loosely on Burroughs, struggles to get to grips with this new, all-consuming, frustrating relationship. Struggles is the operative word. Lee’s life till Eugene shows up consists chiefly of stumbling sweatily through Mexico City in an off-white linen suit that needs a good wash. He drinks too much; he is predacious; he is sexually indiscriminate. He picks up any younger man who will have him and drags him to the nearest, sleaziest motel. His life, in a word, is sad.

But he has company. Jason Schwartzman plays a scene-stealing barfly — Joe—whose single-serving lovers keep taking his things. There are others, with whom Lee has a more or less friendly relationship, if only because they are all gay and American and desperate for company. Through Lee’s interactions with these men, men in the same situation as he, we come to view Lee as exceptional in some way: there is something profoundly artistic, romantic and intellectual about him. He can talk nonsense like the rest of them; but he has soul, emotional intensity. This is in part why his inability to read Eugene is so painful. He craves real spiritual intimacy.

Hence his interest in telepathy. It reflects his longing for connection without the obstacles of ego, language, or miscommunication. For a man as profoundly self-conscious as Lee, telepathy represents an ideal of intimacy: the direct, unfiltered sharing of thoughts and feelings. So desperate is he for access to Eugene’s mind that he persuades him to go to Ecuador in search of a plant called ‘yage’ (that’s ayahuasca to us). He has read that the F.B.I. are using it to read minds. And here the film takes a sharp turn. Frankly, we go through something like tonal whiplash, as Lee and Eugene find themselves hacking through the jungle in search of a botanist to help them brew up a psychotropic potion.

Alienation, desire, power, identity, dislocation, language and its limitations—Queer explores these and other very modern themes, refracted through the lens of Lee’s experiences and, in particular, his lust for Eugene. Guadagnino, in his take on Burroughs, explores life lived outside of things—life lived, if you like, with our face pressed up against the window of the world. Lee is rendered vividly (thanks in no small part to the outstanding cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeepro) and yet through dream sequences and scenes in which interior light and neon are the only means of a street’s illumination, he, stumbling home, or heading to a motel, appears to us as something like a hologram which seems to shudder and shake as if at risk of vanishing.

All of this, if it were not blindingly obvious, is to the massive credit of both Guadagnino and Craig, without whom Queer might easily have come across as a seedy, sleazy sort of flick with a repellent central character. Guadagnino has a gift for elevating the awkward and the everyday, for finding romance and beauty in the grungy and the sordid. That, and a talent, already mentioned, for charging his scenes with an eroticism that is almost palpable. For Guadagnino, as for Bulgakov, love enhances sensuality, but sensuality also gives distinction to sex. His films, and perhaps none more than Queer, are marked by beads of sweat, glances held too long, and that impression of trapped energy and thwarted raw emotion that makes Michelangelo’s work so striking. As for Craig, we have to say that not many actors could do James Bond and a character like this one, despite the homoerotic overtones of Skyfall (which seemed at any rate like a clumsy attempt to “bring Bond into the 21st century”). Craig ought to be praised just for getting out from under the great big shadow that the James Bond films tend to cast upon their leading men, and to take on a role so violently different from that of the unflappable, independent, so conventionally masculine super-spy.

Starkey, too, deserves praise for portraying a man so profoundly inscrutable. We find ourselves as puzzled as Lee is, unsure what to make of someone at once so inaccessible yet one who, from time to time, will break out in a soft smile or in other words show just a hint of warmth. No wonder Lee is tearing his hair out. We are tempted to think Eugene is just stringing him along. Perhaps he is. And of course, Eugene stands, one one reading, for the cool indifference of the straight majority culture towards sexual outsiders: tolerant, but not quite welcoming, and perhaps even mocking or exploitative. Indeed, this is suggested by the title of Burroughs’s book—Queer—which evoked the hatred levelled at sexual minorities at the time of its writing in the 50s.

Eugene stands, on one reading, for the cool indifference of the straight majority culture towards sexual outsiders. But there is something more expansive and—to coin a phrase—inclusive going on here. The longing that Queer so movingly conveys can be compared to the Underground Man’s longing for recognition, to Aschenbach’s yearning for the beauty of Tadzio, to ‘the search’ of Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, or to Werther’s intense desire for Charlotte. We find ourselves unsatisfied, walled in, unable to draw on the meaning intrinsic to experience. So we try to find a replacement. ‘Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity,’ as the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton puts it.

Your mileage may vary on that particular point. Suffice it to say that Queer, which deals with the particular experiences of a particular person in a particular time and place, has a far broader human resonance. And it really is very lovely to look at, too.