8. Queer, dir. Luca Guadagnino
Double Guadagnino in 2024. This makes him, the first director ever that I've listened twice on a Top 15 list. Challengers is the more commercial movie. It is the "straighter" movie. Audiences are more ready to see a film about attractive young people be horny than they are to watch this, a movie about a sad homosexual drug-addicted writer (Daniel Craig) stewing in his own loneliness in Mexico City. One is people living the most exciting moments of their lives, the other is a man desperate for connection. Challengers has a thrilling sports sequence edited to maximum intensity, while Queer has a single long-take its hero injecting heroin into his veins while all alone in a dark, silent apartment. Nobody today does longing as well as Luca Guadagnino, and he has not made a movie as achingly lonely as Queer before.
Queer is the second film I have seen about the works of famed beatnik author William S. Burroughs. This follow David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch starring Peter Weller and a series of horrible alien flesh typewriters. Both films use Burroughs' pseudonym "William Lee". And both versions of the story must deal with the notorious death of Burroughs' wife, Joan Vollmer. It is a sin that hangs over them, in guilt and shame. In real life, Burroughs was playing a "William Tell" game with Joan, with whom he was having severe sexual and drug problems. We must use passive voice to describe what happened since the details are otherwise so unclear: she was shot in the head. Burroughs was actually convicted in absentia of murder by the Mexican government. Naked Lunch makes this event the fulcrum of the entire story, seemingly Burroughs/Lee's attempt to find and redeem himself for this act, only to repeat it at the very end, choosing a found identity of an artist over salvation. Queer keeps this event very quiet, there is only one mention of a wife at all, and an off-hand one at that. The "William Tell" act appears in the final sequence, with a different figure entirely. You could easily have no idea what this was in reference to. Instead, Queer is much more explicit with the titular subject matter of sexuality, which Naked Lunch is ambivalent about. This 21st century Burroughs/Lee is a gay man in the back half of his life, on a spiritual journey for love that can never be.
This history really hits when you hear that very first song used in Queer, Sinéad O'Connor's cover of 'All Apologies'. With such lyrics as, "everyone is gay", "what else I should write", "I'm married" all standing out knowing Burroughs' history. The camera gives us a close-up of various items in Lee's hotel room, including a collection of firearms. Later Kurt Cobain himself will appear on the soundtrack in 'Come As You Are', which has the disturbing line "I don't have a gun" (tragically resonant for both the singer and the writer).
Queer is set in 1950. All this Nirvana is as out of place here as it was in that Peter Pan prequel movie. Equally impossible is Lee's age. Burroughs would have been in his thirties in 1950, Daniel Craig is 56. Craig is a handsome man in great shape, but Guadagnino and his DP, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (hello again), shoot the former Bond so every wrinkle and gray hair stands out. This movie star has never looked more like a man in the back half of his fifties than he does in Queer, his good looks are straining against the lush of too much booze and the rust of age.
The first half of this film is a lucid drama of Lee pissing his way across bars, flirting with the young expatriate boys in post-war Mexico. Craig fills the awkward silences with frantic conversation, a desperate charm. He's found yet another wonderful accent to match his Benoit Blanc or Joe Bang. The story does not get truly weird until the second half. Guadagnino and Mukdeeprom leave you a few hints we are going somewhere other than a mere period piece: there's a lot of miniature shots, a lot of rear projection. We're always on the same block in Mexico City, in the same few sets. It only gets stranger once we jump on a doomed road trip.
The longing and disaster comes together as Lee falls in love with a handsome younger man, a GI named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), this thin quiet boy. The type to leave plenty of room in the conversation for the older mans' dry witticisms. Eugene is friendly, and open enough to sleep with Lee, which is an immense release for our protagonist. Few films present the act of giving a blowjob with as much religious ecstasy as Queers gives it. But Eugene states he's not "queer", the term Lee uses for himself. Whatever Allerton is - it is never given a label - he's not an emotional partner. Their relationship goes from friendly to sexual to even akin to prostitution, but ultimately they are not bonded. We in the audience never understand this character, nor does Lee.
The third act of Queer takes Lee and Allerton on an odyssey across the Americas, into deep jungle, to transcendent forms of existence. And for one magical evening, their minds are expanded into something more. There is a scene in Queer that I could describe as "body horror", but that is the incorrect term. It is flesh transforming, but not in a negative or terrible way, quite the opposite. Maybe a "body romance", where the confines of the humanoid form are transgressed. What decades of straight filmmaking has decided is terror, Queer decides is a transgression that can be celebrated and envied. The tragedy is not that it breaks a boundary, but that the boundary cannot stay broken, that normal life resumes the morning after.
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