Where’s the filth? I wrote down the question on page two of my notes, roughly about when Queer entered its second chapter, sending Lee (Daniel Craig) and his young lover Eugene (Drew Starkey) on a quest for ayahuasca in South America. Having spent the first section tracking Lee as he fritters time away in Mexico City, drinking and flirting and sleeping with fellow drifters in neon-soaked motels, this is when the film should get sweatier, dirtier, trippier––long, long before the couple has its first taste of yagé. It’s a chapter that promises to unleash all the pent-up carnality Queer had accrued in its opening scenes. And sure enough, the two men sweat profusely, the journey gets more and more surreal, but the drug-induced paranoias and voracious sex exude the same quality they did in the first segment: a plastic, stylized artificiality. Guadagnino’s brand of sensualism has always courted a certain stilted-ness; even at their horniest, his films always struck me as oddly chaste, the works of a choreographer as opposed to a filmmaker. So again: where’s the filth?
If the neatness here feels so damning it’s because Queer is based on a novella of the same name by William S. Burroughs, and as anyone mildly familiar with the writer will tell you, “stylized” or “chaste” aren’t exactly the first words to associate with his prose. Queer had been written in the late 1940s as an extension to Junkie, Burroughs’ first published novel, a memoir of his addiction to opiates that also dogged a character named Lee. Neither Queer nor Junkie skimped on the grotesque or disgusting; in his introduction to the former, Burroughs wrote that Mexico, where he lived and worked on the book, was “basically an Oriental culture that reflected two thousand years of disease and poverty and degradation and stupidity and slavery and brutality and psychic and physical terrorism.” A place that was “sinister and gloomy and chaotic, with the special chaos of a dream.” Rereading Queer on my way to Venice, I was stunned by the vividness of its stench and grime, so pervasive and persuasive I could sense the muck accumulating on my skin.
Dirty as the novella was, Guadagnino’s adaptation feels almost antiseptic. It’s not that characters are immune to shit and self-destruction. It’s that the director, working with a script by Justin Kuritzkes, operates on a completely different register; the filth doesn’t feel or look real. Nor do his characters’ emotions. To be fair, Queer makes no mystery of its artificiality. Mexico City is never called by its name, and Stefano Baisi’s production design makes ample use of matte paintings and soundstages to craft the rooms Lee skulks in and out of. In this nameless purgatory, everyone exists in a trance of drug-addled rootlessness––none more so than Lee, a man with no job and just enough cash to hit the bar at five and begin his long, restless pursuits of sex and drugs. It’s in one of those peregrinations that he happens into Eugene (Gene) Allerton, in a meet-cute that exemplifies one of Guadagnino’s worst tendencies: to visualize these epiphanies––when a character awakes to the shattering power of their desires––with the grammar of a music video. As a non-diegetic track swells, the two men lock glances; time slows down, and so does the frame rate.
Guadagnino is not new to adaptations. Watching this, my mind kept jolting back to one from a few years back, Call Me by Your Name, still his best to date and among those very rare cases of a film standing taller than its source. That’s because the director was able to translate the overpowering force of Elio and Oliver’s desire to an extent André Aciman’s writing did not––not with the same rawness, at least. Queer charts a tempestuous affair, following Lee and Eugene on a journey from Mexico to Ecuador powered by lust and hallucinogens, and its depiction of sex is much more graphic (not that Call Me had set a high bar). Still, even here the “action” feels strangely pudic, with Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camera demurely panning away. For a romance Burroughs had couched as largely univocal, an obsession that was never fully “even,” Queer fails to channel Lee’s passion with the same self-consuming ardor––never mind Craig’s commitment to the bit. His character is an articulated loafer who wields dry, self-deprecating humor like a shield, and the actor does an admirable job chewing some of the clunkier lines. Yet even he can’t grant Lee a modicum of interiority. In keeping with the film, his wanderer comes across as an empty vessel. Burroughs had described him as a “disintegrated” person; Kuritzkes opts for “disembodied,” a word bandied about whenever Lee tries accounting for his chronic loneliness.
Disembodied how, exactly? As the film grows more hallucinatory and the border between bad trips and reality becomes blurrier, Guadagnino resorts to spectral imagery––a crawling centipede, a snake eating its own tail, a legless body. There’s a chasm here the film doesn’t resolve. Because for all that Queer can tell us about Lee’s imaginary inner life, it reveals almost nothing about his more realistic inner life: we leave not knowing him any better than we did at the start. Perhaps the point here is that an addict’s consciousness gets blanked out by years and years of substance abuse. Perhaps. Yet for a film based on a book of such complex and full-rounded characterization, the suggestion seems a cop-out. I’m always wary of directors calling their works “personal,” as Guadagnino has said of his latest. Mostly because the idea always winds up raising some expectations, as if “personal” should translate into a more vulnerable, more vibrant, more alive work. But if that’s the case, Queer’s hollowness––its inability to fully flesh out its hero’s psyche––feels all the more conspicuous: a failure of the imagination.
Queer premiered at Venice Film Festival and will be released by A24.
The post Venice Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is a Hollow, Stylized Vessel of a Film first appeared on The Film Stage.
