by Elisa Giudici
Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in QUEER (photo: Yannis Drakoulidis)
Luca Guadagnino's 2024 double feature, early release Challengers and the new premiere Queer, explore the intricate and slow process of calibrating love. In both,love is a delicate balancing act where one person loves intensely, perhaps even desperately, while the other remains more passive, content to be loved without being deeply invested in the relationship. The fundamental difference between the two lies in how they resolve this imbalance...
Challengers is an immediate and seductive film because it suggests that equilibrium in love is achievable, even when a relationship expands from two to three people. The film proposes that love, in its fluidity, can find a way to balance out these differences, making the idea of an expanded relationship dynamic not just possible but fulfilling.
Queer, however, is more challenging and harder to digest; it takes a pessimistic view on the possibility of bridging this emotional gap. The film suggests that to truly connect across this divide requires something extraordinary—a special drug hidden deep in the Ecuadorian jungle and a willingness from both parties to open themselves to what might lie beyond their current understanding of love, no matter how frightening it might be.
Luca Guadagnino's cinema is once again more challenging and less fluid when he is deeply connected to the subject matter. Guadagnino is one of those rare filmmakers whose work feels more immediate and accessible when he approaches it with a certain playful detachment. However, when a project is personal, like this adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Queer, which Guadagnino has dreamed of making since he was 17, his cinema becomes less accommodating to the audience, more daring, and, as a result, more prone to missteps.
Daniel Craig and Luca Guadagnino on set (Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis)
In Queer, the distance between Guadagnino and the material disappears, and what emerges is a film that challenges the viewer, refusing to meet them halfway. This makes Queer a film that demands patience, openness, and a willingness to engage with the discomfort that comes with exploring such a deeply personal and pessimistic view of love.
Queer is the story of an unasked question. After fleeing the oppressive 1950s of the United States, William Lee (Daniel Craig) meets Eugene (Drew Starkey, evoking the dangerous sublime charm of a young Jude Law) in one of the many bars of Mexico City. The young man is “like a fish: cold, elusive, hard to catch”. Nothing in his perfect detachment gives clues about his sexual orientation, while around him Lee, Joe, and the other characters proudly and ostentatiously display their inclinations. Is he queer? Lee asks and wonders, but he never finds the courage to pose the question directly to Eugene.
Daniel Craig embodies, with great abandon and passion, the identity of a lover desperately in love, dazed by desire as much as by drugs, for whom the carnal conquest predictably isn't enough. Thanks to the extensive use of drugs and the intention not to make an adaptation of the novel but rather of Burroughs' literary production, Queer becomes a film of hallucinatory visions, dreams, and illusions, reminiscent of the finale of Suspiria (another deeply felt project by the director).
Queer is also a film of hands and feet. In an empty movie theater where Cocteau's Orpheus is playing, the ghost of Lee's desire to touch Eugene with tenderness and possession manifests. Phantom hands caress ribs, hands that slip under the skin in a danced choreography in the heart of the jungle that marks the fleeting but concrete possibility of real contact between the two. Lee's shoes and then feet are protagonists of visions that fade from Lynch to Fellini, passing through Buñuel: within them lies all the loneliness of a man who is kept company by drugs, who feels alone even when he has a lover in bed, who frequents bars and hotel rooms that seem more imaginary than real, ready to transform into miniatures, to change skin.
The new film also marks something of a consolidation of Luca Guadagnino's cinematic grammar. There is even a subtle self-mockery during one of the three explicit erotic scenes. During an oral sex scene between Lee and Eugene, there is a lateral pan of the camera towards the open window overlooking the night sky, just as in the much-criticized fade in Call Me by Your Name. Here, however, the camera then returns, showing what is being caressed, sucked, the ecstasy of orgasm, the adoring gaze of someone who loves to give pleasure to the other. The filthy dimension, the sticky and reprehensible patina of sex seen by Burroughs, is completely absent. In Guadagnino's adaptation, bodies speak the truth and always have their own elegance, even when they overdose on drugs or on love.
Sex, once again, is just a step in Lee's failure to escape his own loneliness, to truly communicate with Eugene. A photo taken by the young man of Lee and an unconsciously tender gesture of his calf are the only, very raw seeds of what could have been. In the epilogue, Guadagnino lingers a bit too long in the visions that follow, so much so that the film could have easily ended in the dense jungle, cloaked in the magic of a fleeting but nonetheless present understanding.