(Image credit: Yannis Draklidis)
In Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, the James Bond star gives a fantastic performance as a libertine writer addicted to indulgent sex and hard booze, and he’s arguably the film’s most compelling character.
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When Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name was released in 2017, the director was criticized for the embarrassment of a sex scene between two male lovers. Even the film’s screenwriter, James Ivory, argued that Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer should have been shown naked. “To me, that’s a more natural way to do it than hiding it or panning the camera out the window to the trees, as Luca did,” he said. Clearly, Guadagnino had this in mind when making Queer. Queer, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, features Daniel Craig in bed with a man, and the two of them intimate from steamy beginnings to explosive endings. If you enjoyed watching Craig strut out of the ocean in a swimsuit in Casino Royale, you’ll enjoy this one.
Well, maybe in a way. But his character, William Lee, is worlds away from the secret agent who made Craig a superstar, even if they share a common love of casual sex and hard booze. Queer is based on a novel by William Burroughs, which was published in 1985 but was written in the 1950s as a dramatized account of the author’s own experiences. The story begins in Mexico City, where a dissolute Lee wanders from bar to bar in his trilby hat, linen suit and a pistol on his belt. Over tequila, Lee gossips with his fellow American drifters, including a beer-bellied writer played by Jason Schwartzman. He also has his eye on a man who might share his hotel room with him. One of the candidates is Gene (Drew Starkey), a photographer with a fresh face and radiant good looks. Lee is smitten with the young Adonis from the moment she sees him, but the fact that she’s not sure if Gene is gay makes the stranger even more appealing.
(Credit: Yannis Dracoridis)
Craig gives a touchingly vulnerable performance as a frustrated, jaded drinker who knows he’s not who he once was, but who still retains a sheen of his former splendor. Stripped of all the confidence that shrouded James Bond and Benoit Blanc, Craig reminds us he’s an exceptional actor, and his heartbreaking performance is enough to sustain the sad anti-romance of the two expats. But the Mexico City section, entitled Chapter One, takes up only the first third of Queer. Chapter Two finds Lee and Jean traveling to South America, where Lee trembles and weakens from heroin withdrawal. Chapter Three finds the pair hacking their way through the Ecuadorian jungle in search of a plant that might give them telepathic powers. In the course of this quest, they meet a cackling botanist (played by, of all people, Lesley Manville) who deals with snakes. Queer then takes a bizarre turn as a body horror film reminiscent of Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria.
Queer
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Starring: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville
Duration: 2 hours 15 minutes
Given how unpredictable the story is, I can’t say the film was boring, but it’s not gripping either. Burroughs’ novel is beloved by fans for its unusual honesty and vulnerability, and Guadagnino has said he wanted the film to be “a tender…universal story about love.” But he and screenwriter Justin Kritskes craft a series of quirky, mildly amusing vignettes with a variety of self-indulgent characters who don’t have much of a connection to one another and barely know each other. It’s hard to care about any of them. Craig’s soul-baring and skin-baring aside, Queer is a proudly artificial curio, with its anachronistic soundtrack of Nirvana and Prince songs and its studio sets that look like they were painted by Edward Hopper. As a result, the love story is less moving than the one in Call Me By Your Name, or as moving as those in Guadagnino’s recent films Bones and All and The Challengers. It’s also not as moving as Casino Royale.
★★★☆☆
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