Queer

 

Luca Guadagnino's sweaty and smoky adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1985 novella Queer might strike some as oddly retro in subject matter, considering the amount of LGBTQ+ themed film and television content being produced now. But this fever dream of stifled desires strikes familiar notes in different ways.

Burroughs' story tells of William Lee, a drunken junkie writer in Mexico in the 1950s, and his obsession with a younger ex-Navy man of opaque sexuality, Eugene Allerton. It stars Daniel Craig as the boozy and blistered Lee and Drew Starky (Outer Banks) as Allerton.

Craig trimmed a bit of his famous James Bond musculature for the role of the anxious intellectual in linen and fedora searching for love (or its approximate) in all of the wrong places. Though he doesn't look like he would have any trouble in that respect, Lee wears misery like a cheap suit. He finds solace with a coterie of equally verbose lonely hearts, primarily his friend Joe (a plump Jason Schwartzman in good form), with whom he frequents the local watering holes to trade gossip.

For his part, Starky's Allerton presents an inscrutable figure: his bearing is ramrod straight, spit and polish, and he keeps company with a local woman but doesn't shut down Lee's pursuit of him. He gives little away, aside from tales of his military exploits. He seems to be innocently oblivious at times, and at other times, cagey and cruel.

This uncertainty only fuels Lee's desire to explore a rumored jungle plant that supposedly enhances human telepathy, which might help him make fulfilling human connections. Though he seems impervious to ridicule, it's clear that he wants more out of life, though what that would be in its totality, like so much else in this picture, is not apparent.

Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) is an exacting director with an eye for environmental detail. When the story takes Lee and Allerton into the jungles near Quito, Ecuador, in search of a botanist (Lesley Manville), the heat and primordial vegetation press in, just like Lee's lonely desperation. It's stifling.

But with the help of herbal hallucinogens, Lee's anxiety takes flight, and the audience accompanies him in the last quarter of the picture on a lengthy trip that finally offers the realization that maybe what's in front of us is all there is. This table, this drink, this friend, this day.