Guadagnino's Adaptation of Queer Falls Frustratingly Short

If there’s one thing we can rely on with a new Luca Guadagnino film, it’s that it’ll be different than the last. Since breaking onto the Hollywood scene in 2015, the Italian filmmaker has yet to run the same style back. After striking gold with the tender romance of Call Me by Your Name, he sprinted the opposite direction, returning the next year with the horrific tenderizing of the human body in his Suspiria remake. Or, take Bones and All and Challengers. Or, on the other side of that, Challengers and Queer, his vastly disparate 2024 features, released only months apart.

Where Challengers took on the modern world of pop professional tennis, Queer finds itself in the avant-garde literary realm of William S. Burroughs, a heavy-handed, overbaked, and sluggish adaptation of the maverick writer’s downbeat bender of a novella that he wrote over a period of three years in Mexico City in the early 1950s – the story’s setting.

William Lee (Daniel Craig, impressive for what he’s given) adores the dusty metropolis far south of the American border, where he can dress in light linens everyday and taste the sun to his liking. Much to his pleasure, there’s nothing to do but chase boys, read the paper, chain-smoke cigarettes, and slug tequila, mezcal and cerveza. Day and night, everyone sweats from the heat and the booze like it’s their job. Without ice, the drinks are served neat, warm, tall, and on credit to add to the illusion of it costing the American expats (who flood the area) nothing. Yet, for all of this, Lee is only in Mexico because his opiate addiction isn’t criminalized there.

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He can’t keep up this lifestyle for long. No one can drink that much and eat that little – much less trade water for cigarettes and shoot heroin regularly – and survive. Moreover, he’s now in his 40s or 50s and can’t find anything to live for that loves him back. He’s a persistent junkie, a man of insatiable desire and little patience, which doesn’t help. Jason Schwartzmann, in his fifth (wildly different) feature role this year, is terrific as Lee’s sweaty, tequila-swollen bestie Joe. The two bounce from bar to house party to nightclub, swapping sex stories and eyeing the newly arrived college boys, typically starting at their main haunt, Ship Ahoy.

In brief, Queer is largely about Lee’s desperation and addiction – his bullheaded binges and hopeless romances, in which he hopes to imprison someone with suffocating affection. The listless plot only ever advances because of his inability to let go of something, be it opiates or Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), the steely-cool, college-aged expat fresh off the bus with a towering confidence that reverts Lee to the emotional maturity of a child. After enough of Lee’s pursuit, Eugene gives in a bit, the viewer, like Lee, unsure of his sexual preferences. Eugene does like the sugar daddy element of time with Lee, who will do absolutely anything to win him, but he’s harshly against being won, his youth and independence his greatest treasures.

The first half of Queer – loose, languid, sexy, sad, and surreal – is significantly better than what comes after. Per Stefano Baisi’s production design, the vibrant mid century Mexico City sets run together as if they’re all on the same intersection, giving an intimate yet dazzling One From the Heart-esque scope and feel. At times, it’s a true delight, not taking itself too seriously while stretching its creative muscles in light of the novella’s filthy-famous style, the film full of new flourishes from Guadagnino and regular DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.

When we first meet Lee, he fuzzes out with the television. It’s a marvelous depiction of what it feels like to be spiritually empty and physically kaput, captured as he turns into a translucent digital gray, the world remains in color, and Joe’s voice transforms into a static hiss. Later, we see Lee’s specter of choice expressed in style over exposition (though there’s no shortage of the latter). When they sit across from each other at a bar, a phantom arm lifts from Lee’s body and caresses Eugene’s soft, smooth face, nearly yassified in comparison to Lee’s leathered and weathered skin. Similarly, when they sit in a movie theater, the same ghost emerges from Lee’s body to warmly kiss Eugene.

The moments in which the stylistic flourish of Queer speaks are often the most compelling. Most of them are expressed through the imaginary, Lee’s dream sequences usually earning our attention back, be they of a dismembered woman hovering in the air or a concrete maze laden with personal totems. But they don’t always land. The drawn out ayahuasca trip near the end is full of flourish yet devoid of the significance that gives the earlier embellishments weight.

With reluctance (but a free ride), Eugene eventually accepts Lee’s invitation to explore South America together, the junkie of the two hoping to find the substance he’s heard will give them telepathic abilities. By the time they leave Mexico City, Lee is arguably two of the worst kinds of sick: Junk sick and lovesick. The combination yields a shell of a man – trembling to the bone, beads of cold sweat all over – and dull, frustratingly empty second and third acts.

The contemporary alt-rock needle drops of Queer are aloof, to say the least. It works when Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” soundtracks a slo-mo night walk through the streets of Mexico City that culminates in a grungy cockfight where Lee first lays eyes on the man he won’t be able to let go of. But that’s the only time it works. The rest are squirm-inducingly misplaced, including the other Nirvana song, Sinead O’Connor’s acoustic cover of “All Apologies,” which plays in full over the opening credits and unintentionally garnered laughs in screenings at both Venice and NYFF. The lyrics are perfect (“all in all is all we all are”) for what’s to come, but if the music clashes that hard, it doesn’t matter.

By the end, so many disparate metaphors have forced their way into the story that it feels lost in its own menagerie, the film blending the life of Burroughs with the life of Lee in a way that should’ve been executed with more subtlety and tact or simply left out. It makes sense that they bring Burroughs into it – in fact, it’s expected – given the highly autobiographical nature of the story. But second-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes’ metatext is too messy and Guadagnino’s direction uninspired. Where Burroughs achieved the profound in the brevity of the novella, Guadagnino punishes you with longwindedness, ending after (non-final) ending souring the film into a clock-watching endurance test.

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Writer:
Starring: Daniel Craig, Jason Schwartzmann, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville
Release Date: Nov. 27, 2024

Luke Hicks is a New York City filmmaker, film journalist, and musician by way of Austin, TX. He earned his Master’s studying film philosophy, theology, and ethics at Duke University and is the founder of the Brooklyn-based Art Mob Productions.

Guadagnino’s Adaptation of Queer Falls Frustratingly Short of Burroughs’ Groundbreaking Novella