When William Lee stalks through Mexico City in “Queer,” he often seems on high alert, though sometimes he’s just high. The louche protagonist in Luca Guadagnino’s soft-serve adaptation of the William S. Burroughs autobiographical novella, Lee is a smoker, drinker, heroin addict and epic storyteller. He’s a refugee from America who at times seems like a visitor from another dimension. Played with sensitivity and predatory heat by Daniel Craig, Lee has a feverish mind, eyes like searchlights and a mouth that’s quick to sneer. There are moments when he seems possessed, though it’s not often clear what’s taken hold of his soul.
As in the book, the movie follows Lee during an adventure that takes him from Mexico circa 1950 further south — to Panama, Ecuador and parts distinctly unknown — only to bring him back to where he began or thereabouts. The novella runs a scant 160 or so pages, and while it’s crammed with incisive details, characters and observations, the story is fairly compressed and, for the most part, focuses on Lee’s preoccupation with another American, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a tall, good-looking veteran. Lee first sees him gawking at a street cockfight, a distinctly Guadagnino take on what romantic stories call the meet cute.
It’s rapture at first sight, at least for Lee, who’s soon chasing Allerton across the city. The younger man coyly, coolly, keeps Lee at a distance until they fall into bed. Guadagnino stages and shoots their encounter with discreet intimacy and pretty lighting, imbuing it with longing. This sensitivity may seem surprising given the outrageous visions, including a talking anus, that fill Burroughs’s most famous novel, the phantasmagoric “Naked Lunch” (1959). Yet desire suffuses his “Queer,” which he began writing in 1952, some six months after he fatally shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a horrifying, calamitously drunken game of William Tell.
Burroughs remains best known as one of the coolest cats in the Beats; it was Jack Kerouac who suggested the title for “Queer.” Burroughs came from money, had a difficult past, sartorial flair, a hypnotically droning voice and a sinister aura. “He’s up there with the pope,” Patti Smith said. “Without Burroughs,” Lou Reed said, “modern lit would be a drama without a page, a sonnet without a song and a bone without gristle.” Burroughs, who died in 1997, and Kurt Cobain collaborated on a project, and Nirvana is featured on the soundtrack, suggesting Burroughs’s reach. He was a classic American figure: the nonconformist as cult.
The most unconventional thing about the Lee in Guadagnino’s version of “Queer” is that he’s played by Craig, who, of course, is famous as the most recent James Bond. It’s understandable that Craig would seek out roles that put distance between him and Bond, a glossy cartoon of masculinity. It’s both startling and funny when, early in “Queer,” Lee enthusiastically claps a hand on the naked butt of an unnamed guy (Omar Apollo), a moment that Guadagnino presents in close-up so that the backside all but fills the screen, becoming a monumental landscape of desire. Craig isn’t just committing to this role; he is also throttling his Bond.
Written by Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” “Queer” follows the novella fairly faithfully, though with customary and unexpected liberties. Lee pursues Allerton, and they become involved amid a blur of drinking, partying and talking. (Jason Schwartzman pops up as Joe, a lampoon of Allen Ginsberg that borders on the offensive.) In time, Lee and Eugene take off for South America to find what Lee calls yagé (the hallucinogen ayahuasca), a mystery drug with potential powers. The trip is by turns brutal and tender, and ends in a jungle where they meet an ayahuasca expert, Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), and her husband (the filmmaker Lisandro Alonso), who fling open the doors of perception.
Guadagnino, best known for “Call Me by Your Name,” the wistful coming-of-age drama that made Timothée Chalamet a star, isn’t exactly the filmmaker who first springs to mind as a persuasive interpreter of Burroughs. Guadagnino makes well wrought, largely frictionless, attractive movies with attractive people; for the most part, I enjoy them. Perhaps David Cronenberg, who directed a version of “Naked Lunch” (1991), was busy. Whatever the case, Guadagnino has an international profile, a commercial track record and an obvious work ethic: “Queer” is the second of his movies to be released this year, following “Challengers,” a frothy entertainment about young tennis champs and their relations on court and in bed.
By virtue of its source material, “Queer” is an outwardly heavier, more overtly serious and formally complicated movie than “Challengers.” Even so and unsurprisingly, the two are — along with “Call Me by Your Name” — of a piece in their romanticism, hermeticism and smooth visual patina. Guadagnino does some very nice things in “Queer,” including employing obvious soundstages and beautiful miniatures that play with the realism and that underline Lee’s otherworldly sensibilities. There’s also a trippy scene in which Lee and Allerton’s naked bodies fuse together, a vision of ecstatic union. Yet Guadagnino can’t help but sand every coarse surface; even the filthiest walls here look carefully buffed to perfection.
That’s true of Lee, even with the frisson of menace, the hint of rough trade, that Craig brings to the performance. When Lee is out on the prowl in Mexico City, he often wears a rumpled white suit, a pistol strapped to his waist. There’s swagger in his step, though as one drink follows another, he begins to recall one of those decrepit gunslingers in old westerns, the kind who enters soused and stumbling but retains his decency and quick draw. For better and for sentimentalized worse, that describes this Lee. He may have been Guadagnino-ized, and much about what makes him tick, his past and his art, remains obscured. Yet in Craig’s ravaged charisma you do see someone who’s ready to blow open other doors of perception.
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