You’ve gotta hand it to Luca Guadagnino. The director picked up an impressive amount of critical and commercial love for the gay indie romance Call Me by Your Name in 2017, and has worked tirelessly to both recoup and challenge that adoration ever since. He confused everyone by remaking the horror classic Suspiria as a brainy, disjointed tale about the Holocaust with Fassbinderian touches in 2018, then seemed to curry pop favor by reteaming with Timothée Chalamet for Bones and All in 2022, but that movie put everyone off. Then, earlier this year, his bi-curious tennis drama Challengers struck the zeitgeist and became his biggest box-office hit.
Now comes the other swing of the pop pendulum with Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella about an American heroin addict cruising 1950s Mexico City. Between the dejected aimlessness of its first half and the note of body-horror phantasmagoria on which it ends, it’s guaranteed to sift out the fake Guad-heads from the real once again. I greatly enjoyed it, even as it initially upended my expectations of the director’s typical softness, the Guadagnino touch—relaxed opulence via gorgeously appointed interiors, shabby-chic exteriors, menswear that looks the way menswear is always supposed to look but rarely does.
On the surface, Queer has all of those things, but its thematic darkness and hallucinatory narrative descent make it far from the most Guadagninoesque Guadagnino, as I expected it to be. Still, it does the most to stretch his aesthetic over a purposely sleazy narrative and foregrounds the obsession with surfaces found throughout his oeuvre. I was unsurprised to see gay acquaintances divided in their opinions: the edgier ones felt it gentrified Burroughs’ nastiness and hid it behind custom JW Anderson; the, uh, aesthetes loved its pacing and responded viscerally to two surreal scenes near the end, a narcotics-fueled dream ballet between Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey and a psychedelic gun-toting nightmare, both of which visualize the idea that each man kills the thing he loves. Others had no idea what to do with its disjointedness and detested it outright. The least surprising thing, and god bless all involved, was the snobbery brought out by the whole ordeal—everyone staking their claim on how it did or didn’t portray queerness, desire, and Burroughs. (The title sort of begs for it.) Everyone’s right, of course, but the middle ground that emerged for me is what I think will ensure its place in the pantheon of gay cinema.
The editor Ira Silverberg, who actually knew Burroughs, wrote on Instagram that the film is “made for bougie fags who want to go slumming”; the notion of gentrification is interesting in this context, and not only because Burroughs, who was born into a wealthy St. Louis family and received monthly allowances long after college, was doing a variation of that during his time in Mexico City – even if “slumming” for him was a lifelong project; “to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses,” as demon twink Arthur Rimbaud once wrote. Guadagnino loves the finer things, yes. He might even be called a dandy. But the dandy has been as essential a part of the hustler in terms of representing and advancing gay culture, and Queer applies the former’s aesthetic to the latter’s story. A backstreet marriage as old as time, it works. And Guadagnino, a third-culture kid, born in Italy, who grew up in Ethiopia, has a keen eye for displacement. (I found it poignant that, really aside from an early appearance by Omar Apollo, most Mexican characters have their dialogue distorted into a muted variation of Charlie Brown’s teacher—Craig’s character, Lee, is hyperfocused on his own lusty hunt.)
The writer and musician Brontez Purnell, whose sexed-up musings perhaps make him the Genet of our era, had similar issues. But, while he told me that while the muscley Daniel Craig is hard to believe as a junkie, he was ultimately seduced by the film. “It was stunning,” he said, “but, with this team, what else would it be? I just wish this had been made by Americans because Americans know how to make something ugly and beautiful. These people only know how to make things beautifully beautiful, and it’s not that type of story.”
