Words by JANE CROWTHER

Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino returns to another beloved book with an intense gay romance at its centre with Venice Film Festival buzz-generator Queer; adapting’ Beat icon Wiliam S Burroughs’ unfinished autobiographical novel tracking his time in Mexico City and South America during the fifties. Starring Daniel Craig as ‘gentleman of independent means’ and heroin addict, Lee, as he wrestles with love for a young man (Drew Starkey) who ‘obliges’ him with sex, Guadagnino puts his particular swoony stamp on Burroughs’ raw, explicit prose. 

Divided into chapters and crafted from Queer and other Burroughs’ works as well as aspects of his real life, Queer begins with Chapter 1: How Do You Like Mexico? – a portrait of crumpled, mezcal-swilling ex-pat Lee as he looks for love in gay scene bars alongside his unlucky friend Joe (Jason Schwartzman, a rumpled delight) and the so-called ‘green lantern boys’. While outwardly he seems to be having fun as he lurches from bar to bar and picks up men, Lee searches for something more profound. As he listens to the hapless Joe’s misadventures with hook-ups, Guadagnino has him flicker transparently like a ghost, becoming insubstantial, incomplete. He wanders the streets in slow-mo soundtracked by Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ (linking Lee’s sensitivity to Cobain’s as well as their shared drug of choice) and takes one night stands back to a seedy motel that looks like a Hopper painting.

It’s during these boozy wanderings that his eyes meet over a cock fight (of course) with handsome ex-US serviceman Allerton. An experienced cruiser, Lee is tilted off-balance by Allerton – a man whose sexuality he struggles to read and who makes him a blushing, awkward, giggling suitor. The duo hang out, watching Jean Costeau’s Orpheus and drinking until Lee can bear the tension no more. In a speech lifted directly from the text, Lee confesses his ‘proclivities’. Allerton, as slinky as a big cat, agrees to accompany him home and a complex love affair begins that starts with an erotic sex scene and travels to Ecuador and the Amazon jungle for hallucinogenic drug trips and dark nights of the soul.

That Daniel Craig can do more than Bond is well established but his performance here might startle those most comfortable with him in impeccable suits seducing women – and Guadagnino gives him a couple of cheeky vodka martinis to sip on in a nice nod to his famous role. But this is Craig flexing all his career muscles; sozzled and soulful, vulnerable and nuanced, he paints a universal portrayal of the lovelorn, the disconnected. There’s a delightful pathos and humour he brings to scenes where he begs Allerton to meet him halfway in running headlong into love and lust. And in sexual moments he radiates a tenderness and yearning that gives greater depth to scenes tabloid newspapers will no doubt have a field day with.

Building out on Naked Lunch’s centipede as a motif, the drugs trips of The Yage Letters and the author’s thoughts from his Last Words, as well as incidents from his real life (his wife’s accidental shooting is represented in party tricks and dream sequences), screenwriter Justin Kuritzes and Guadagnino create a lurid study of one man’s interior life. Filmed entirely at Cinecittà Studios, the locations are rendered in a vintage postcard feel that’s like a memory and the anachronistic soundtrack takes in Prince and New Order to give further elasticity to the idea of reality. This is a just a version of a fifties moment in time, intended to be like the magic mirror in Cocteau’s Orpheus or the high promised by Lesley Manville’s feral botanist who provides Lee and Allerton with the yage cocktail deep in the jungle; a reflection. ‘It’s not a portal’ she tells them. The same is true of Queer – it’s a comedy, a love letter, a travelogue, a heroin withdrawal account, a trip, a study of an artist… depending on your own proclivities.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Queer is in cinemas now