Close your eyes at any point during “Queer” and you might still smell the sweat and booze and stale tobacco wafting off-screen. If not quite as seductive as the Northern Italian summer of “Call Me by Your Name,” the world director Luca Guadagnino evokes here is no less transporting, sweeping us into the tequila dives and roach motels of mid-century Mexico City for a prolonged bout of same-sex yearning. And though adapted from the book (and life) of William S. Burroughs, this carnal film builds just as much on the filmmaker’s ongoing interest in unmet desire, finding greater ecstasy in the wait than in the act.
Shedding the last of his Bond persona – while keeping the same taste for libations – Daniel Craig stars as Bill Lee, a hard-living junkie for all the squalid pleasures the world has to offer. He’s a writer of means, biding his time in Mexico City with enough passive income to devote full attention to more hedonistic pursuits. Short days and long nights are spent ever on the make, often alongside his trusty friend Joe (a nearly unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman, padded and furry and made out to resemble Allen Ginsberg). Only the script – once more written by “Challengers” collaborator Justin Kuritzkes – never engages with either man’s literary pursuits, reflecting a rather different set of goals.
Recreating whole environments on Italy’s fabled Cinecittà backlot (and with the help of Wes Anderson’s key miniature guru), Guadagnino opens a window to a world gone by – that time of pre-Stonewall cruising, where a certain love went unspoken, necessitating a more tactile form of flirtation. At a bar one night, Lee locks eyes and locks in – and his heart (or at least something) flutters when the young lead seems to reciprocate. Only the war-vet turned journalist Allerton (Drew Starkey) never makes his way to Lee’s table, so the older man pays his own attention elsewhere.
There are always options, one need but look. And after another flirtation turns fling, both Lee and his make get right back to the prowl to better seize the nights that have no last call. But there’s something about Allerton, something that captures Lee’s interest whenever he’s near. The younger man is certainly playing hard-to-get, and perhaps is not queer at all – though he runs in a somewhat eyebrow-raising circle for that to be the case. And even after finally consummating the deed – following a near 30-minute binge of attrition, lubricated by drink – Lee finds himself just as unfulfilled. Turns out, our old coot has caught that more powerful form of lust, one that nears that other L word. The feeling is not shared.
Split into three chapters, “Queer” pines with a hunger that cannot be fed. After Lee grows tired of Mexico City’s boozy nights and occasional hookups, he entices his young friend-with-benefits with a trip further south. But once the pair set-off on a kind of kept-man tour of the Amazon, the nagging issue of Lee’s heroin comes to the fore. Overstating the case with an anachronistic soundtrack heavy on Nirvana, Guadagnino casts all of Lee’s addictions as one and the same. Whether shaking with withdrawal or admiring his lover in repose, the next fix remains ever out of reach. Company can be bought, but genuine intimacy, well, that’s a different story.
As in “Call Me by Your Name,” Guadagnino tries to physically express introversion, giving Craig the time and space to communicate acute and conflicting emotion in long takes that play out on his face. Unlike “Call Me by Your Name,” which raised hackles in some parts for Guadagnino’s oblique pan away once the two leads finally got going, “Queer” is comparatively less chaste, if never particularly explicit. At the same time, the filmmaker is far more interested in Lee’s immediate post-coital melancholy. Even sharing the same bed, Allerton is nearby and a universe away. If only a drug could fix that.
Adapted from a notoriously unfinished and posthumously released novel, the film assumes a greater degree of creative liberty for a third chapter that follows our intrepid leads into the jungle on a quest for Ayahuasca. Whereas earlier chapters matched the downing buzz of booze and horse, the very rhythm and timbre evolve once loopier substances are brought into the mix (and bloodstreams). Alongside come loopier characters, most notably an American researcher gone native, played with shamanistic glee by Lesley Manville. But once she finally delivers on her promise, the film flies high into reverie, never to return.
Sure, Guadagnino can orchestrate a third-eye freak-out, and he even caps the extended trip with indelible wish-fulfillment, composing images that see the two men finally breaking free of their corporeal divide – and then the film keeps going, breaking from this original take on the William S. Burroughs mystique to reheat the leftover of “Naked Lunch.” The extended coda feels all the more frustrating as it builds from an ideal final scene – but maybe that’s the point. Burroughs and Guadagnino are artists of indulgence, and Lee is hardly one to throw in the towel and call it a night. The prowl is ongoing, the party never stops, and that accursed hunger will never be met.
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