Before the release of Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” the film was the subject of online chatter about its runtime. Early rumors pegged the duration at over three hours, and its announcement in Venice Film Festival’s lineup initially listed 151 minutes before adjusting to the premiere’s length of 135 minutes. The Italian director claimed one aim of adapting the titular novel by William S. Burroughs with his “Challengers” screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes was to finish the unfinished text. Yet the version first shown to audiences may pay a different kind of tribute to the text by feeling slightly incomplete in its own way.
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“Queer” feels unsettled and inconsistent—but never anything less than fascinating to watch unfold. Like the identity that gives Guadagnino’s film its title, the experience feels elusive, engrossing, and full of contradictions. It’s at once sprawling and simple, scattershot and streamlined. It’s got visual flair to spare as Guadagnino channels everyone from Baz Luhrmann to David Lynch. But it also features more than a few narrative lulls as it charts the winding path of an undefined relationship between Daniel Craig’s middle-aged William Lee and Drew Starkey’s young student Eugene Allerton.
There’s an immediate parallel between Kurtizkes’ scripts for “Challengers” and “Queer” in their preoccupation with the inarticulacy of intimacy. “I want to talk to you without talking,” Lee tells Allerton of his ultimate goal in their communication. With varying degrees of effort, both men struggle to provide clear verbalizations of who they are and what they expect from others. The duo’s egos and personas are on display in all their vulnerable fragility and pleasure-seeking frivolity throughout the film.
If they could, Lee and Allerton would express themselves not with words but with physicality. Kurtizkes understands that the establishment of boundaries in these men’s sexual orientations would never get hashed out verbally. It’s all in body language that they project an identity and invite the other to explore it alongside them. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is fluent in such a vocabulary of subtle sensuality, making the fits and starts of Lee’s determined pursuit of an evasive Allerton the most arresting portions of “Queer.”
Guadagnino complements this cinematic realization of Burroughs’ consummation of desire with an extrapolation from the text. Rather than limiting himself to period-appropriate ’50s music, he uses grunge tracks from Nirvana (along with some other anachronistic needle drops like Prince’s “Musicology”), using the sounds of a later generation to reflect the sentiments of passion in non-timebound terms. But rather than merely reflecting the outward ecstasy of the Beat Generation, these counterintuitive song choices draw out the agony from under the surface.
Other Guadagnino swings focus on the more immediate sensations evoked by the attraction of two bodies in close physical proximity. The most fully developed visual metaphor in “Queer” involves imagined extensions of the characters that reflect corporeal confidence unencumbered by societal shame. This begins by visualizing an extension of Lee’s touch that can be bold in his tender courtship of Allerton in a way his tentative approach of the undeclared flirt cannot.
The motif continues until it culminates in a sequence of skin contact so rapturous and revelatory that it features credited choreography by Sol León and Paul Lightfoot. By this point in the progression of their exploration of each other, Lee and Allerton’s bodies are so entwined with their yearnings that their physical forms can become one. In Guadagnino’s sensory-driven cinema, this ultimate transcendence of the physical form altogether represents the ultimate vision of ecstasy.
These characteristically bold directorial choices help highlight the latent emotion within Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical tale of infatuation. Kuritzkes’ scripting builds on this by adding an entirely invented third section of the story, which brings this view further into focus by having Lee and Allerton obtain the “yage” (more commonly known as ayahuasca) denied to them in the novel. It’s worth it for the ultimate payoff in Lee’s quest for “telepathy,” but the picaresque plotting across various Latin American countries can often drag “Queer” into repetitive cycles of Lee’s compulsions. That’s true of his accelerating drug use and his longing for Allerton, both of which frequently begin with frustration before their eventual fulfillment.
To their credit, the two leading men find an inexhaustible variety of ways to express their mysterious, magnetic connection. Their efforts to push past the political, especially in the way they have internalized harmful cultural stereotypes about gay men, and get down to the personal offer some semblance of forward motion while their journey otherwise moves in circles. Daniel Craig delivers some of the most soulful and scintillating work of his career in “Queer,” consistently finding ways to surprise with his ability to make Lee a character entirely open and stealthily withholding.
Yet rising star Drew Starkey is the film’s true revelation. He constructs Allerton as possessing something akin to Schrödinger’s sexuality with his ability to reflect exactly what an observer wants to see. In many ways, Starkey is the purest driving force of “Queer” as he presents his character’s true needs as a puzzle for solving. His beguiling demeanor presents an invitation to engage without being a solicitation to ogle, a fine line to toe that the actor does nimbly.
“Queer” fixates so intently on maintaining this fluidity that the overall structure of the film does feel a bit flimsy. “What’s the story?” asks Jason Schwartzman’s loveable slob Joe in the film’s epilogue. He’s asking his pal, Lee, but the question could just as easily go to the audience. Guadagnino finishes the film by incorporating elements of Burroughs’ life only knowable to those who came in having done their homework on the author, a curious reopening of a film otherwise in the process of sealing itself off inside its own creation.
Nothing in “Queer” feels egregiously incorrect or ill-considered. (At least it’s not like Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” remake in that regard.) But for a project that purports to tie up the loose ends of a story left open-ended for several decades, something feels oddly unsettled – and not just reflective of the nebulously definable title – in this narrowed-down iteration of Guadagnino’s prior cuts. [B]
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