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Queer, which is based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, is the latest film directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers) and stars Daniel Craig as an American expat who is gay, horny, sweaty, drug-addled and becomes infatuated with a younger man. It’s not exactly Christmassy, but it is very Burroughsy, and it may be the best performance of Craig’s career. I can’t think of any other actor who could have shaken off Bond in such a sexually daring way, not even Roger Moore.
I can’t think of any other actor who could have shaken off Bond in such a sexually daring way, not even Roger Moore
Queer is Burroughs’s follow-up to his better-known Junkie and it’s a sad tale that is highly autobiographical, which makes it sadder yet. Burroughs’s alter-ego is William Lee (Craig), who lives among a community of gay expats who gathered in Mexico City in the early 1950s.
Lee wears an off-white linen suit that has seen better days and will see worse. He is boozy and predatory and promiscuous, touring the bars to pick up young men with whom he will retreat to one of those motels where the neon is bright and the one towel is thin and ragged.
He reeks of desperation but is handsome, in a gone-to-seed way, and is a good talker, so is never short of company. No one hides who they are here. A fellow barfly, Joe (a delightful Jason Schwartzman), keeps picking up men who steal from him. They pinch his watch, his boots, his radio. But he is open about it and has reconciled himself to it: “The trouble with me is I like the type who rob me.” As with most of Burroughs, it would be funny if weren’t so sad.
Lee is a tragic case, and he could be repellent too if Craig didn’t make him so heartbreaking. We understand his loneliness but is all that about to change? One night, blearily stumbling home, he passes a street cockfight where his eyes meet those of a fella in the crowd. (Is this the first cockfight meet-cute in cinema history?) The fella is Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), who is young and good-looking and beautifully dressed. (Jonathan Anderson, creative director at Loewe, oversaw the look.) Lee is instantly infatuated. But Allerton is not easily seduced. He is aloof and unreadable, which only makes him even more irresistible. Is he even queer? There’s an American woman he plays chess with, Mary: what is she to him? Lee behaves like a nervous schoolgirl in front of his crush. It may have been a while since he’s felt anything at all.
Eventually, he does talk Allerton into traveling with him to Ecuador in search of “yage,” the psychotropic plant now known as ayahuasca. He’d read it enables telepathy and there is a sense that he’ll do anything to know what Allerton is thinking. This takes a tonal swerve as we find them hacking though the tropical rainforest. It suddenly feels a bit George of the Jungle and then Apocalypse Now — although they don’t find Kurtz. Instead, they find Lesley Manville playing a crazed botanist. Needless to say, a hallucinatory trip ensures. It wouldn’t be very Burroughsy otherwise.
The film features a smart screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes (Challengers), an eclectic and evocative soundtrack featuring, among others, Nirvana and Prince, while Guadagnino shows us why he is now, surely, the master of erotic desire. There is nothing especially graphic here. There doesn’t have to be. A close-up of a back muscle, a throat, a crook in the elbow does the job.
But it’s Craig’s powerful performance that makes it. Much is asked of him and he delivers. In lesser hands, Lee would definitely be repellent, but Craig deploys his ravaged charisma to imbue him with such pain and longing and woundedness that we feel for him.
However, if you’re after something more Christmassy and less Burroughsy — something for the whole family — the new Wallace & Gromit is out in the new year. And that may be the better bet.
