William S. Burroughs’ Queer is the latest to get the Luca Guadagnino treatment; as he tells the story of a sex tourist, Daniel Craig’s William Lee, in his late forties, journeying to 1950s Mexico City. He’s unashamedly queer – as the opener set to Nirvana’s Come as You Are that immediately follows a Sinead O’Connor song in expert music choices after another, a real Guadagnino trademark, that has run through all his films since Call Me by Your Name.
Here, this is an examination of problematic characters; there’s no denying that, Lee is a man who ends up recruiting a young American student, Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkley, for a tour into South America. Lee is lonely and desperate, the opening act you see him trying to seduce straight men with no luck and getting rebuffed at every turn; he’s losing his edge. Craig’s performance as Lee, that desperation; that loneliness, that need for connection at all costs, the struggles of self-identity, is one of the finest performances of the year. If there were any justice in the world, he’d be a frontrunner for the Oscars – as would Guadagnino for Queer, it’s a better movie than the excellent Challengers and may even be his best movie thus so far. It looks effortlessly cool and stylish, the sun-baked small American community in New Mexico is beautifully shot and the production is immaculate whether you’re wondering through the jungle or at home in a small bar. The soundtrack being omnipresent really works wonders – non-diegetic music such as (Ghost) Riders in the Sky also feature with superb results. It’s a mood piece, created with the skill and craft like no other. I mean – how many other directors would dare to drop New Order in a 1950s queer period drama adaption of William S. Burroughs book? But then Luca Guadagnino is no other director. A whole dissertation can be written on the reframing of Riders in the Sky as a queer anthem.
Visual storytelling is pushed to its limits – the descent into the jungle in the third act is emotionally charged and as an adaption of the Burroughs book, it really wants me to seek out the source material. It’s billed as a Luca Guadagnino love story, but as expected, anyone who’s seen Challengers would know, Queer is far more than that – edited masterfully to create an eccentric, otherworldly edge – it’s benefited by Craig in the form of his life; determined to prove how much he doesn’t care about James Bond and how much he’s ready to let it go. You’d be wrong to mistake Craig for anybody else here, even Benoit Blanc. His range is unmatched and you have to wonder what acting choices he would’ve made had he not spent the best part of a decade trapped in the role of Bond; as iconic as his turn as the character is.
The dovetail into an eccentric odyssey in the third act may throw off some people as it takes a radically different turn from the first act, but there’s enough there to like about Queer’s structure, it’s masterfully ambitious and just tonally magnificent – transformative and iconic in a way that arguably no movie has been this year. The fact that this is Guadagnino’s second of 2024 alone shows just how talented a filmmaker he is; as someone who’s been hit and miss with him in the past and find his work usually grows on me the more time removed; having Queer work so well as it did the first time is a gigantic success. Less straightforward than anything the director has made in the past, and it’s easily apparent that magic is possible in the most magical realist of ways, surreal, surprising and visually fantastic – a real masterpiece and so unafraid to come as it is.
