In “Queer,” Luca Guadagnino’s ebulliently scuzzy and adventurous adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ early confessional novel, William Lee (Daniel Craig), a dissipated refugee from America, is having dinner with Eugene (Drew Starkey), the beautiful young man he met in the underbelly of Mexico City, when he starts to explain how he came to grips with his sexual desires.
Lee, who wears white linen suits, a fedora and clear-framed glasses, a trusty handgun, and an appraising scowl, looks like the dandy version of a CIA spook. It’s the early 1950s, and though he drinks around the clock and is frequently a disheveled mess, in his appearance and demeanor he’s something of a straightarrow. At first, he says, he regarded his proclivities as a “curse.” He shook with horror at the word “homosexual,” which made him think of “the painted, simpering female impersonators,” he says. “Could I have been one of those subhuman things?”
Leaving aside how badly that thought dates, we understand where Lee is coming from. In his world, homosexual signifies something at once depraved and emasculated. He, though, is very masculine, and he refuses to think of his desires as corrupt. That’s part of the reason he’s come to Mexico City. He can shoot heroin there more easily than in America (where it would make him a serious criminal). And in the slovenly cantinas south of the border, he can be his own queer self.
“Queer” tells the story of Burroughs’ love affair — his attempt to forge a relationship with Eugene, who as played by Drew Starkey, behind owlish glasses, is like the world’s most intellectual Calvin Klein model. Lee first spies him in the evening street, in the middle of a crowd gawking at a cockfight. The scene is shot in slow motion, with Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” on the soundtrack, making the whole thing an underground vision of rapture. From Lee’s point-of-view, it’s one of those love-at-first-sight moments. He’s so smitten he’s dazed, as if he’d seen a god.
But even as Eugene coaxes out something new in Lee, we’re meant to see that Lee is already liberated from the self-hatred bred by a culture that pushes queerness into the shadows. His revelation was that he could be queer and masculine, a man of “forbidden” desire as well as his own gruff, open, aggressive self. What makes Lee, in “Queer,” a figure ahead of his time, a kind of madly imperfect but quirky crusader, is his insistence on being exactly who he is at every moment.
Daniel Craig, shifting about a dozen gears from James Bond, doesn’t make the mistake of impersonating the older William Burroughs who became a punk icon in the ’80s: the dry voice, the beady-eyed stare of hostility. Craig gives us a pinch of that glowering Burroughs DNA, but the trick of his performance, which is bold and funny and alive, is that he’s playing the younger Burroughs (at the time, the author was around 40), before he’d passed through the looking glass of cultivated insanity to write his visionary novel of American chaos, “Naked Lunch.” This is Burroughs before he got famous, when he was just…a man, pursuing what his instincts told him to. Craig makes him a nasty, witty literary dog laced with vulnerability. Pounding back shots of tequila, spitting out winding assertions like “Your generation has never learned the pleasures that a tutored palate confers on a magnificent few,” he’s a troublemaker, an abrasive soul. But he is also, deep in that bitter heart of his, a romantic. He tries to maintain power in every situation, but as soon as he meets Eugene, we see that the desire for love has supreme power over him.
Adapting Burroughs’ slender unfinished novel, which was written as a sequel to “Junkie” (1953) but not published until 1985 (it was Burroughs who kept it out of circulation, maybe because after defining his brand with “Naked Lunch” he was no longer willing to be seen as that vulnerable), Guadagnino, the brilliant director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name,” has a splendid time immersing us in the seamy corners of Mexico City, which in this movie recalls the sleepy ’50s border town of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.” He colors in a community: Lee and the other queers who hang out at the Ship Ahoy, a tastefully lit bar/restaurant, like Joe, a roly-poly nerd libertine (played by Jason Schwartzman, unrecognizable under ruddy padding, a bushy beard, and tortoise-shell glasses), or Dumé (Drew Droege), a vicious queen who also holds court at the Green Lantern, the district’s more seriously queer bar.
Why is Eugene at the Ship Ahoy? He goes there with a woman friend (Andra Ursuta), though it’s clear he’s got curiosities in other directions. But he has never acted on them. Burroughs based the character on Adelbert Lewis Marker, an American Navy serviceman he met in Mexico City, and Starkey, in his clear-eyed way, makes him a mystery dreamboat. Eugene clicks with Lee and becomes his drinking buddy, learning soon enough that Lee has designs on him. The seduction that happens is spiky and believable, as Lee, who’s both a white knight and a bit of a predator, woos Eugene from his comfort zone and into the queer zone. The first sex scene between them is tender and exciting, suffused with quivering heat. The second one, when Eugene allows himself to be fully taken for the first time, is cathartic.
“Queer,” in its first half, is a luscious barbed comedy of liberation, punched along by its anachronistic music choices (Nirvana, Prince, New Order). Lee, who calls himself a “man of independent means” (he has family money), is content to live this life of pleasure and indolence, to revel in his addictions. The Mexico City queer scene we see is both squalid and a kind of paradise. The men share their cruising stories and bitch at each other with bitter understanding. And there’s an undeniable racial/class hierarchy at work, with Lee picking up a young Mexican (played by the gap-toothed pop star Omar Apollo), fingering his bronze caterpillar necklace with a kind of casual colonial entitlement.
Lee and Eugene sleep together, but they’re not quite a couple. Eugene wants his “independence,” which for him means independence from defining himself as queer. (He’s one of those men who thinks: Maybe I’m just dabbling.) And that’s the central reason that Lee begins to pursue his other obsession: setting out to South America to look for Yage (pronounced yah-hey), a plant found in the jungles of Ecuador that’s said to have telepathic qualities. Lee is obsessed with this for a reason that’s scurrilous but also kind of tragic. When he starts babbling about how the Russians, and maybe the CIA, are using Yage for thought-control experiments, he sounds, for the first time, like Burroughs the grandiose paranoiac of “Naked Lunch” (which was published in 1959). But the truth is that Lee is obsessed with telepathy because he thinks it will allow him to control others — like, for instance, Eugene. That’s why he asks Eugene to come to the jungle with him.
“Queer,” in its second half, turns into a very different movie, a trippy road comedy about the search for mind-altering transcendence. The film loses some of its pulse; it meanders. The novel did indeed take Lee into the jungle, but he never found Yage. Guadagnino, though, doing his own variation on the Burroughs mystique, decides to let Lee find what he’s looking for. Lee and Eugene traipse through the jungle and make their way to Dr. Cotter (played by an unrecognizable Lesley Manville, with greasy black hair and dirty teeth), an American botanist who’s been living there forever, amid the snakes and the foliage, doing “research.” She takes them in, and they cook up some Yage, which results in a hallucinatory sequence that’s pure high-wire loony-tunes filmmaking. The movie we thought we were watching comes close to stopping dead in its tracks.
Yet even as “Queer” sinks into a kind of torpor, this daring and indulgent sequence is also a fulfillment of the film’s vision of William Burroughs, and of queer love. The telepathy works. And what Lee learns is that Eugene will never think of himself as queer, even as their bodies are literally merging (an indelible image). The last third of “Queer” may prove to be a challenge for audiences — much more so than the film’s explicit eroticism. Yet Luca Guadagino is telling a version of the same compelling story that he told in “Call Me by Your Name”: that of a queer love that, instead of delivering the salvation it promises, withers under the gaze of the real world. The film’s final shot is stunning. It shows that you after all the drugs, the warped crusades, the queerness he owned, the one thing William Burroughs could never figure out was how to heal his broken heart.
From Variety US