Queer (2024)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
With Queer, Luca Guadagnino attempts a near-impossible feat: translating the hallucinogenic cut-up style of William S. Burroughs into images. The result is a careful and measured work that, despite significant production efforts in set design, doesn’t always succeed in delving deeply.
The Dreams of Yage
It’s 1950. William Lee is an American on the verge of fifty, living in exile in Mexico City. He spends his days mostly alone, except for brief interactions with other members of the small American community. Meeting Eugene Allerton, a young student recently arrived in town, shows him for the first time the possibility of finally establishing an intimate connection with someone.
There is a moment when William Lee—Bill Lee is the pseudonym Burroughs used throughout his writing career—during a drug-induced delirium, sees a miniaturized version of himself walking through the filthy corridor leading to his hotel room. It’s just an instant, a psychedelic shot lasting only a few seconds, yet it seems to encapsulate the essence of Queer, the ninth feature film by Luca Guadagnino (the sixth in the last nine years, reflecting a significant increase in his production pace). The bloodshot eye through which the character played by Daniel Craig spies on himself is, in a way, the same eye of the Palermo-born director, who in turn scrutinizes, studies, and reflects on himself and the meaning of what he is portraying on screen. Faced with a nearly unmanageable text, as is always the case with Burroughs—only David Cronenberg succeeded in re-representing his world with Naked Lunch—Guadagnino is fearless and, after stripping Bill Lee, lays himself bare as well. In that body lying on the bed dreaming/imagining/reverberating nostalgia for himself, his era, and his love, there is not so much the affection of the novelist but that of the director. As paradoxical as it may seem, Queer gradually transforms into an accurate self-representation, an exploration of desire that goes beyond the materiality of the body, as suggested by one of the film’s most beautiful directorial insights, when a crossfade allows Bill to gently caress Eugene Allerton, the young man he’s fallen for. A gesture that is impossible, ephemeral, ectoplasmic, like a life lived (at least) twice, in the concrete and the imagined.
Burroughs’ cut-up inevitably soars higher, stripping away the predetermined and predictable form of literature, and Guadagnino fights an unequal battle, nevertheless choosing to reorder contemporary production practices, selecting the classic as his true point of reference. Thus, a completely reconstructed Mexico City set at Cinecittà emerges, an ode to the fantastic, the impossible, but also the impermanent; the set is as transitory as Bill’s life, it can be destroyed or redefined in different spaces and ways. It also recalls—similar to what Saverio Costanzo did a year ago with Finalmente l’alba, or as seen just a few months ago at Cannes in Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour (all films that, incidentally, feature the splendid cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom)—how cinema is not real because it is true, but rather real because it is imagined. Re-imagined, if you will. Gargantuan in its production scale, Queer nonetheless tries to follow the source text with reverent fidelity, with a journey that begins as sexual, then geographical, and finally drug-fueled, unfolding between Mexico and South America, where Bill and Eugene venture into the jungle in search of Yage, the plant Bill believes can develop telepathy and mind control (“the Soviet and U.S. governments are already experimenting with it…”). Compared to the source text, there is a romantic, affectionate softening that almost obscures Burroughs’ sarcastic and assertive ambitions; little wordplay, much love, as underscored by the choice to minimize references to the sexual commerce that is reiterated on multiple occasions in the novel. Daniel Craig, tasked with the challenging job of distilling Burroughs’ immense ethical-political-intellectual stance into a performance, handles it well, particularly in the convincing first part of the film, where he is seen tirelessly moving from inn to inn, bar to bar, from mescal to cognac, searching for bodies to love, or even just to gaze at with desire.
In this context, Guadagnino confirms himself as a fertile filmmaker, even though some shadows emerge here and there—the scenes in the thick of the forest seem less focused, but perhaps the protagonists’ delirium is simply overtaking the staging—and some choices feel forced or perhaps unnecessary: the use of songs from subsequent decades, from Nirvana to Prince to Verdena, doesn’t effectively contrast with the classic setting and doesn’t add a further layer of reflection on what is happening on screen. In what is perhaps his most overtly cinephilic work, it is no coincidence that Guadagnino calls on fellow filmmakers like David Lowery and Lisandro Alonso to play small roles, or that one encounters fragments of Powell/Pressburger, Lynch, and the Coens; it is art reflecting on art, understanding that it is always about life, and that cinema, touted as immortal, is actually a transitory element, destined to vanish in turn, carrying with it the memory of what was, what was loved, the desire that never fades to be embraced, caressed, protected from oneself.
Raffaele Meale
Quinlan, September 3, 2024
