An American expatriate in 1950s Mexico City, who sleeps around with younger men though insists he is not a “queer”, develops an obsessive attraction to a G.I., and subsequently travels to South America in search of ayahuasca -believing it can grant telepathic powers. This is the story of Queer -it is also the story of its author William S. Burroughs, who composed the novella during his time in Mexico (while awaiting trial for the infamous death of his wife), publishing it only decades later. Queer was one of Burroughs’s more obscure books, though evidently less opaque than his usual writing, given it was found and read and understood by a seventeen year-old Luca Guadagnino. Guadagnino identified it as no less personal to Burroughs than any of his more experimental pieces, and a story that retains its profound pathos.
Though he may deviate in tone and feeling, and invents an ending to a book that was unfinished, Guadagnino certainly honours Burroughs in his film adaptation of Queer -evident where this otherwise tragic romantic drama illustrates the psychotropic effects of its protagonist’s amphetamine addiction. Until the last act, such droplets of surreal scenery are rare, but Guadagnino gradually infuses them into William Lee’s subjectivity, a mix of pride and fear and craving for an affection that he knows will ultimately not come. The usual beat generation metaphors, translated with appropriate starkness here.
William Lee is the self-insert name of most of Burroughs’s protagonists, and in this case his alter ego is played by Daniel Craig. In his routine of bar-hopping and seducing young men he becomes transfixed with Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey. The pair begin a casual sexual relationship, though while Lee’s interests clearly only become more deep, Allerton keeps him at a distance -avoiding him where it suits him. But the pair’s relationship grows more curious as they eventually travel to South America together on Lee’s own quest for a magical drug.
“Magical” is the appropriate term -something Burroughs believed in as much as his avatar; and his perspective is pretty vital in taking in this story. In one of Craig’s most engaging and complex performances, he plays the twin natures of Lee’s identity in perfect tandem. He is brash, opinionated, and charismatic -though perhaps in an off-putting way -carrying himself with a very particular kind of masculinity you see often in the homoerotic contexts of the Beat writers that almost insinuates an inherent masculine dominance in the act of having sex with men. Of course it is in the film’s actual sex scenes that we see Lee does not quite actually live up to this. Allerton has all the power in these situations which Lee derives a greater need for and experiences more pleasure from (it is also apparent in some conscious bits of meta-text, i.e. the full-frontal nudity of Starkey, but not Craig). There is a sense from Lee that he didn’t expect to fall so hard and is in some conflict over this attraction, and yet its pull is irresistible. Craig’s manner hints at this, while simultaneously conveying both unshakable, borderline obnoxious confidence, and pitiable, tender vulnerability.
There is a tenderness, as is usual with Guadagnino to the sexual scenes between Lee and Allerton, that goes hand in hand with the fiercer eroticism. In harnessing the personal nature of the story and Lee's emotional perspective, his camera feels quite subjective on this movie, fixating more on meaningful intimate moments like the touching of their hands, or a discreet hand on the calf, or the sensitive way Lee will hold Allerton's face. With rare exception, such as one scene where Allerton actually hides from Lee, Allerton's own perception and feelings on the relationship are left a mystery. And Starkey is very good at playing this enigmatic figure, through all the time he spends with Lee. He is almost a parallel to Armie Hammer's character in Call Me By Your Name, likewise bringing out more of that passion and compulsion in his partner for this very aura.
Nobody has any obligations in Queer, Lee and Allerton alike managing to live off of G.I. benefits, neither having much interest in immediately returning to the U.S. Guadagnino structures the film into three chapters based on environment, but they don't correspond to the acts and don't delineate the meandering nature of the movie's pace and rhythm, and even tone -which again feels very fitting to the literary style being emulated. When the men find themselves in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle and meet yagé cultivator Dr. Cotter, played broadly by a barely recognizable Lesley Manville, the story takes on more that vivid absurdity of beat adaptations like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and David Cronenberg's version of Burroughs's own Naked Lunch. But only mildly -Guadagnino's surreality though exemplary, is largely poetic and aesthetic. With perhaps the exception of their actual experience with the ayahuasca itself -a brazen and violent hallucinogenic sequence, thrilling and bizarre to witness, yet a scene that remains clear and humane in its illustration of Lee's tenuous psyche.
Lee is something of a hedonist in his drug and sex addictions already, but the rumours of this substance’s properties are particularly enticing. Telepathy -the ultimate solvent to his loneliness. Perhaps if his and Allerton’s minds were linked, there would be an understanding between them -that chasm of longing would be closed. This is the impression that Guadagnino seems to take, consistently drawn to these isolated souls in need of connection -and which I think is fairly authentic to Burroughs’s intent in writing, especially under the circumstances he was in. The painful loneliness in tandem with desire kept intentionally under the surface but nakedly obvious. And it comes out emphatically in Lee’s first morning after with Allerton realizing the depth of his feelings, and in his request to sleep close to him when suffering a bad bout of dysentery just to feel his warmth; and in the ending Guadagnino creates, sombre and tragic and with that eye for beautifully profound yet simple imagery that we saw at the ends of Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All, even to a degree in Challengers. Guadagnino is fast becoming one of the best at this.
Queer isn’t as compelling or as thrilling as Challengers, and even with the little pockets of formal trippy flourish, it isn’t so radical a narrative -certainly it feels like he is relating a story that is not his own, more than even those other movies he’s made based on preexisting works. But that’s very much the point. It is Burroughs’s story told with care and with deep empathy for his feelings and his faults. The lust that was, the love that wasn’t, and the lingering effect of both.
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