Daniel Craig Gives Love a 'Queer' Name In Luca Guadagnino's New Classic

Luca Guadagnino, our modern poet of loneliness, returns to the well for sensitive boys once again after a brief digression into fast-paced Tennis & Sex Land—although one could make the case that Challengers too is very much about three people running in terror away from their clashing issues of abandonment—with Queer, his note-perfect filmed adaptation of William Burroughs’ supposedly unfilmable 1953-ish (it didn’t get published until 1985) novel.

Written by Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes and lensed gorgeously by Luca’s genius oft-DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Queer is a bold act of kindness from one queer to another, excavating an unexpected and impossible love story out from one of our most enigmatic homosexual touchstones. It is a rare gem, haunting and strange, a romance of shivering ache and heartbreak closer to Guadagnino’s Suspiria or Bones and All than the flushed skin and peach fuzz of I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name that Luca-in-lover-mode is known for. It’s dazzling and dirty and sad, like a haunting dream we find ourselves fighting to not wake up from so as to not have to stare at the empty, featureless room that surrounds us.

It is most of all about the outrageous lengths a person will go to in order to find and hold onto an insoluble sliver of something like love for even the briefest of moments. The mountains we’ll climb, the jungles we’ll cut through, the hallucinogens we’ll chug in mass quantities just to approach the sublime for an infinitesimal second. Before it slips away with a headache, a hangover, leaving us trembling in the muck side by side with our object d’amour, nothing but dirt under our fingernails to remember them by.

Daniel Craig (who gives the performance of his career to date) plays Lee, a stand-in so unfiltered for Burroughs himself as to be basically translucent. A drug addict and writer who’s wiling his time away in 1950s Mexico City getting high, drunk, low, and laid, Lee stumbles from dive bar to dive bar looking for a fix of any flavor. He has compatriots—notably Jason Schwartzman stealing his every screen second as Lee’s fellow lonely homo-on-the-hunt Joe—but Lee mostly spends his time trying and failing to fill up the Hopper-esque spaces of congested isolation that he can’t escape from. Purple blossoms rain down on his crisp white suit and he finds himself hypnotized by the beads of sweat on the back of a perfect neck, all while Nirvana screams ahistorically on the soundtrack.

The young man appears. Spotting him for the first time over a slow-motion cockfight—and if you’re looking for it Queer is Luca at his funniest and his most trolling to date—the two lock eyes, and Luca’s camera somehow communicates their unspoken conversation of full sentences and punctuation all buried in looks. A hung open mouth, a small smirk, the sort of saunter that suggests you know your saunter is being watched. Queer romance was once upon a time nothing but coding, silent film at its essence, and nobody working today has perfected the language of bodies in motion quite like Luca. Long cinematic conversations told through the mere cock of an elbow.

The young man’s name is Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, sly and terrific) and he is in actuality, to paraphrase Joe, a cold fish, slippery and hard to catch. Lee nevertheless spends weeks fishing after him without a clue what will come of it, but when they look like Drew Starkey looks under Luca’s lens you keep on fishing and fishing some more. Until one fateful night that is, when Eugene accepts Lee’s invitation over for some poisonous brandy and almost immediately plunks down on Lee’s bed without a word. Nuff said!

Would that it were so simple. The two clearly enjoy each other’s company, but these are men at different stages in their lives—and if you were a ninny who complained about the age difference in Call Me By Your Name then this is one of several instances where Luca doubles and triples down on the complaints about that masterpiece; just wait until you get a look at the twenty pans out the window that interrupt this film’s buzzy (and very hot) sex scenes. Anyway at-odds miscommunications plague these two almost immediately following their rosy-cheeked beginnings—Eugene speaks stridently of maintaining his independence, while Lee is very clearly looking for something, someone, to hold onto. And Eugene can sense it, and slips free—sometimes with real fury—every chance he can get. Swatting at pathetic like the peskiest of gnats, Craig gets to display a comic messiness in moments that’s delicious—James Bond gone to seed and faggotry with exuberant abandon.

That’s when and how a wild notion seizes Lee—remembering a news article he read about a drug called “yage” (aka ayahuasca) discovered down in South America that the Soviets are using to perfect mind control, he decides that him and Eugene need to make the trek to try it out. On the one hand it’s an act of obvious desperation on Lee’s part, a ridiculous elaborate ruse just to keep Eugene by his side for as long as he can muster. A fully-sponsored road trip of such whackadoo incredulity is something only a dope wouldn’t want to experience, and Lee knows by then that Eugene is no dope. This is a bit of business any adventurer worth their salt would seize onto, and Lee promises him as much freedom as he needs along the way—as long as Eugene is just, as he puts it, “nice” to him. Twice a week.

But on the other hand it’s also an extraordinarily moving act of high-concept longing—Lee speaks repeatedly, to each person they come upon during this quest, of the drug’s supposed ability to induce telepathy between persons. And underneath his drunken and performative theatrics, Lee is fully falling apart in the face of Allerton’s seeming indifference—all he wants and needs to know is what Eugene is thinking. For them to be able to communicate, perfectly, without having to speak. His bald fumbling about for the most outlandish form of consummate communication, where words won’t get in the way, is really profound and profoundly sad.

And as the two wander the jungle hacking their way toward whatever they might find, I found the mounting implausibility of their quest, with its outward sheen of globetrotting braggadaccio barely covering over its keenly aching heart, more piering, more affecting, with every despondent step. What the men do find I’ll leave to you to discover—although I will say that Guadagnino’s delight at turning esteemed British thespians into filthy hillbilly psychotics is one of his most endearing repeated quirks—but it broke my heart in its inexpressible loveliness. Luca turns absolute trust into symphonic commingling, a dance of exceptional strange beauty and horror all wrapped up in one hallucinigenic package. For a director who swings between those two impulses, of beauty and horror, as natural as daylight, this almost feels like an apex statement; a summation written in skin.

Queer, steeped in the surreality of its setting—where his Suspiria borrowed liberally from notable female painters and performance artists of the 1970s, this movie is awash in the imagery and feel of the aforementioned Hopper and a heap of René Magritte—is a poem of the unspoken. Symbols, like coded behavior, expressing meaning—dreams and psychoanalysis and vision-quests as crutches for those incapable of just saying what the hell they mean. Only a queer person who spent a lot of time staring out the window as a child could decipher these messages, beamed in from outer space, just exactly this way. And who’d have thought that Luca Guadagnino would turn out to be such a true and honest translator for the buried beeping distress signals coming out of William S. Burroughs? Queer unearths his heart, still screaming beneath the floorboards, and makes it sing its sad, beautiful, heartbreaking and funny-as-hell story. It’s another singular classic-to-be, surprising in ways only surprises can be, from a filmmaker working at the top of their game.

‘Queer’ screened at the New York Film Festival. A24 will release it on November 27, 2024.