QUEER Reviewed by GREG KING
Stars: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Omar Apollo, Andra Ursuta, Daan De Wit, David Lowery, Colin Bates, Ariel Schulman, Lisandro Alonso.
Since he ended his tenure as James Bond in emphatic fashion with No Time To Die Daniel Craig has been deliberately choosing his film roles in an attempt to distance himself from cinema’s best known and most enduring spy. His role as William Lee, a dissolute, self-conscious, self-loathing and lonely gay middle-aged expatriate writer living in Mexico in the 1950s is as far from Bond as it gets, even though he carries around a loaded pistol in his holster.
Craig sports a bad haircut, thick glasses and a shabby, well-worn crumpled white suit. He indulges in alcohol and drugs and sex with younger men, including male prostitutes in a brothel during his nocturnal bar hopping adventures. Then he catches the eye of Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, from Love, Simon, etc), another handsome young American expat. Lee is obsessed with the enigmatic and elusive Allerton and pursues him through a number of bars hoping to form a connection with the younger man.
The two enjoy a casual sexual relationship while Eugene also flirts with an attractive woman (Andra Ursuta) in a bar that they frequent. Then William asks Eugene to accompany him on a trip to Ecuador where he hopes to find yage, a drug that will open telepathic powers within him. In the jungle they encounter Dr Cotter (an almost unrecogniseable Lesley Manville) who helps them open themselves up to hallucinatory new experiences.
Queer is adapted from the uncompromising and semi-autobiographical novella that was written by William S Burroughs as a sort of sequel to his 1953 work Junkie, but not published until 1985. Burroughs was one of the seminal writers of the Beat generation, and his life was every bit as strange as his fiction. His novels are often difficult to adapt for the screen due to their structure. Amongst his other works was Naked Lunch, which was filmed by David Cronenberg in 1991.
Queer follows many of Burroughs’ usual preoccupations and delves into the political and social landscape of the era when homosexuality was still considered taboo. The script was written by frequent collaborator Justin Kuritzkes, who also wrote the recent Challengers for director Luca Guadagnino and he has padded out the thin source material to explore themes of obsession, addiction, unrequited love and wounded masculinity. It is in the third act that the narrative becomes jumbled and bonkers and self-indulgent, and the film falls away, losing momentum.
Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, etc) brings a distinctly European sensibility to the material, and he doesn’t shy away from frank depictions of sex or even male nudity. The languid, steamy environments have been evocatively shot by regular cinematographer Sayoumbhu Mukdeeprom, who captures the exotic settings and gives us a strong sense of both time and place. Mukdeeprom also uses a bold colour scheme for certain scenes that add to the unsettling and occasionally surreal and dreamlike feel of the film.
The evocative score has been written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, while the anachronistic soundtrack itself features Prince, New Order and a couple of songs from Nirvana.
The character of Lee is a thinly fictional version of Burroughs himself. Craig has a decidedly masculine presence here, but he seems committed to the role, imbuing him with a hint of vulnerability and some touches of self-effacing humour. While he has received lots of praise for his nuanced, introspective and emotionally raw performance here, many in the audience will probably not be able to look back on his Bond films in the same way after seeing this film. Jason Schwartzman is also unrecogniseable as fellow expat Joe Guidy, and he brings some touches of humour to the material. Director David Lowery (A Ghost Story, etc) contributes a brief cameo.
Queer is an uneven film with an overly generous running time of 135 minutes, and the film ultimately outstays it welcome.
★★☆
