You can almost smell the sweat, sex and tequila wafting off the cream suit that Daniel Craig wears as William Lee, a former American GI prowling after-hours Mexico City with a coterie of equally debauched expats. ‘Lee’, as everyone calls him, is living from one conquest to the next. Nothing much changes his autopilot ritual of drink-fuck-sleep-repeat until he becomes obsessed with a younger man named Eugene Allerton (Love, Simon’s Drew Starkey). He takes the young man on a journey through South America in search of the connection that can only come through an ayahuasca ceremony.
Adapted from William S Burroughs’ famously horny novel – only published in 1985, over 30 years after it was written – Queer isn’t a story in the traditional sense, more a loosely autobiographical hangout tale. And what is hanging out in this case is usually found tucked away.
Call Me By Your Name and Challengers director Luca Guadagnino has been hailed from some corners of the film industry as the saviour of sex on screen. Queer undeniably has its steamy moments and Craig is phenomenal as a chewed-up charmer who delivers the novel’s loquacious prose with a relish that is part razzmatazz, part ruin. Neither does he shy away from displaying the physical art of seduction, although it’s a shame that Guadagnino is not equally committed, primly cutting to a shot of a window whenever things heat up in bed.
Although he has established a reputation as a teller of sexy queer stories, Guadagnino’s biggest fetish is style and aestheticism. His recreation of 1950s Mexico City is so vivid as to feel unreal, a sensation heightened by the use of painted backdrops and anachronistic songs. The film opens with a Sinéad O’Connor cover of Nirvana’s ‘All Apologies’, and their original ‘Come As You Are’ is not far behind.
Daniel Craig is phenomenal as this chewed-up charmer
Guadagnino expresses his sexual preferences through window dressing rather than the dirty and direct language of desire. Eugene is costumed like a preppy, muscular, all-American snack. For characters intended to be less appealing (or more comical) the aesthetics cut another way. As another gay writer in Lee’s circle, Jason Schwartzman is presented as a figure of fun in what looks like the retrograde use of a fat suit. Meanwhile, Lesley Manville is styled, after a deranged fashion, as a doctor who appears in the ‘Heart of Darkness’-lite third act.
Even so, the first chapter is spellbinding in a way that never fully wears off, thanks to the precise rendering of the rhythms of life in this little circle. Stefano Baisi’s production design sets up a world where you know in which bar which character might be found at what time. Craig is having such a ball that even the gradual revelation of Lee’s heroin addiction cannot shake our admiration for James Bond’s most hopelessly romantic mission: the love of someone who is simply humouring you.
As he and Eugene head south, so does the narrative’s dramatic hold. Once both men get lost in the jungle searching for a doctor – you guessed it – the film follows suit. The CG animals and hallucinations is unconvincing and the rhythm so gorgeously established by editor Marco Costa slows into an inert plod.
Nonetheless, much like Lee in relation to Eugene, we are compelled to hang on to the bitter end. Queer may be flawed, but its naked approach to such a raw subject, coupled with a remarkable lead performance, makes it a trip worth taking.
Queer premiered at the Venice Film Festival.