4 January 2025
Queer is both a brilliant film, and a deeply and profoundly odd film; it’s a hot, sticky, horny, booze and drug-fuelled mess and it won’t be a film everyone loves.
It does, however, feature one of Daniel Crag’s finest and bravest screen performances, naked, needy and carnal. If you’re a Bond fan, I promise you’ll be shaken and stirred.
Gay author William S. Burroughs’ unfinished 1985 novel is a love story marred by tragedy and despair. The former 007 is at its dark heart as Burroughs’ alter ego, William Lee, an expatriate American of invisible means living a life of self-exile in Mexico City in the early 1950s.
Chain-smoking Lee, pissed-up, sweaty and frequently lewd, sporting a disheveled stained linen suit and fedora, spends his days shuttling between bars, gossiping and locking swords with other American gay dipsos (including Drew Droege, who is a constant delight as John Dumé, an older bar queen who sees all and tells all, and was equally stunning – and scene stealing – when I saw him as Ruth in the Off Broadway musical Titanique in New York in 2023).
Cranking himself up on tequila and morphine, Lee’s cruising for a bruising with any young man who catches his eye. He’s in a permanent state of tension and sexual frustration and we see him score big time with a hunky prostitute before his eye is caught by a tall, clean-cut newcomer in town, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a former US serviceman. Eugene in turn seems fascinated by the older man, and is certainly not put off by his almost permanent state of drunkeness or sweaty demeanour. It’s not even clear that Eugene’s really gay, but merely goes along for the ride, sensing he’s found a meal ticket. After drunken sex, Lee, however, becomes mad-about-the-boy and in some of the film’s tenderest moments, director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) layers images, so that Lee’s ghostly hand stretches out to try and caress the sleeping Allerton’s hands and ribs, as if to almost possess him.
The film really takes off in the later chapter when they decide to go together on a trip to the South American jungle, because Lee wants to try the fabled hallucinogen yage, as he’s heard it gives the user telepathic powers and he wants to discover what Gene really thinks and feels about him. It’s a bizarre and uproarious journey into the jungle whose comedy briefly annuls the pain of what he suspects is unrequited love and brings the two into contact with a fierce, reclusive, gun-totin’, snake-wranglin’ scientist and yage expert – a show-stopping cameo for Lesley Manville (believe me you will not recognise her!).
Queer captures both the sensual beauty and dark tragedy of the 1985 novel and of author William S. Burroughs’ own life. It is wonderfully shot by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, largely on a set constructed at Rome’s Cinecittà studios.
This hypnotic, often moving film also speaks eloquently and graphically about queer carnal ecstasy, it’s a fever dream that’s as ambitious and weird as it is poignant and humanistic.
