Queer Is a Perfectly Imperfect Reflection of the Gay Experience

There's a recurring line in Luca Guadagnino's film Queer that serves as a mantra for its characters: "I'm not queer; I'm disembodied." It's a phrase from writer William S. Burroughs' journals, and it makes sense that Guadagnino and his writer Justin Kuritzkes, who also wrote Challengers, chose this as a guiding light in their adaptation. Queer is certainly a queer work, one undeniably dripping in sex and navigation of otherness, but it's more than that. It's a work about how our desires and how we engage with them physically are sometimes at odds with the very real emotional baggage that comes with existing as queer.

Burroughs' novella is an unfinished piece of fiction that follows the same man, William Lee (played here by Daniel Craig). Lee is kind of an asshole but a charming one, a queer everyman. Much of Queer is dedicated to just how much Lee talks, endlessly trying to fill the silences in his life for fear he'll have to confront his insecurities or the reality that he is much like the other queer men in Mexico City that he nonchalantly critiques. The film's greatness is due to the way Guadagnino's Queer presents this frequently bitter queer man, never overly cruel or sympathetic.

Daniel Craig's version of Lee, the heart and soul of a film like Queer, is largely a portrait of a man, his experiences in cruising and chatting, and his desperate crush on Allerton (Drew Starkey), another man who is as attainable as he is distant. Craig's performance is the only truly lived-in one by design, with the other queer men around him coming across as amusing pals, brief dalliances, or seemingly shallow competitors. He pours out a kind of broken humanity that feels raw and honest, his flaws only emphasized by the relative lack of characterization of those around him — from Drew Droege's faux-butch queen, Jason Schwartzman's casual fagginess, and the myriad hot-but-personality-less performers that populate the film. None hold quite the grip that Allerton does on Lee, though, and Starkey is a perfect pick for the role, an absolute blank slate of a man upon which Lee and the audience can project their wishes.

Though lensed by his Challengers cinematographer, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Queer uses the camera to deliver a different type of erotic gaze, one that isn't playful and accompanied by energetic edits but dreamy photography meant to mimic the intoxication of both heroin and desperation. It is a perfect mimicry of Burroughs' most clear-headed writing, more interested in navigating the messy terrain of human emotion than it is in any surrealism. There's a beautifully sobering realism to the way Queer approaches Lee's fixation on Allerton, honest about Lee's own inadequacy and the way he tries to control this man.
When Guadagnino and Kuritzkes are on the same wavelength as Burroughs, practically taking the text exactly as is and bringing it to life, the film is outright gorgeous. What is so smart about Burroughs' text, like some of the best works about the inherent folly in seeking to control the one you claim to love (a la Vertigo), is the knowledge that this connection, this intimacy, cannot be forced. Queer isn't entirely removed from Burroughs' later work — how could it be when it features so many of his pet themes — or even David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch that liberally mixes in Burroughs' experiences with addiction, sex, and the murder of his wife. But it doesn't quite exist in the same branch of science fiction or surrealism that many may come to expect from him. Queer, as Guadagnino has interpreted it, is "a love story" but an atypical one. For the grand majority of the film, the tone is pitch perfect, engaging with desire through the eyes of a cynic in as "real" a way as possible.

While it presents this with clarity, without much of a romantic sensibility, and with all of Lee's ramblings about telepathy and the plants that can grant it being presented without magical flourishes, Guadanino and Kuritzkes, unfortunately, choose a different route. Not only do they try to pepper in imagery from Burroughs' more experimental works and actual life, including his own killing of his wife, throughout the film to varying effect, openly cribbing from Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, but the last act of the film dives headfirst into a surrealist drug trip that never existed in Queer's text and that is accompanied by thuddingly obvious dialogue.

This last act moves the film away from the beautiful miniature realm it creates and drenches in realism, instead opting for an air of "trippiness" that indulges in ham-fisted metaphor. This is most explicit in an extended bit of choreography between the two lead actors in which their bodies meld into each other but even extends to how the dialogue in this last act feels the need to clarify the film's themes. It's an obvious tell that even Queer is unsure whether or not its lazy surrealism could be grasped by the audience, so much so that it needs to reassure them in the same way that Call Me By Your Name had to have a character explain to its protagonist and its audience that being gay was a-OK.
These beats take away from some of the more inspired formal touches and depictions of longing in Queer that come earlier. In one particularly memorable scene at a cinema, the two men sit with some space between them. Double exposure is used to mimic an out-of-body experience that showcases what Lee truly desires as he calmly sits while watching the film. That kind of in-camera effect, as opposed to the visual effects work, is an inspired way of depicting the visual language of conflicted desire and showcasing that the pain Lee is feeling extends beyond Craig's aching eyes and into the frame itself. Hell, it's an even better way of depicting the thesis of "I'm not queer; I'm disembodied" than having characters actively state this. Just like Suspiria before it, Guadagnino's tendency to over-explain and go off script from the work he's adapting is a problem with Queer, one that detracts from what a damn good artist he can frequently be.

At its best, Queer is bursting with life, certain frames even looking like something straight out of a painting — some frames even recalling work by Edward Hopper or Francis Bacon — and working on the same level of quiet ache and tortured desire as Guadagnino's best films, I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. So much of the film shines because of its immaculate design, from the sets and costumes to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' intoxicating score and the striking performance at its core. Anachronistic music choices — New Order, Nirvana, and Prince, among many others — aren't just fun and effective accompaniments for the 1950s scenario, sometimes reflecting Burroughs' impact on contemporary art and music. It creates a timelessness that mirrors the way that Queer's writing still feels of a piece with how queer men navigate the world today.

But that begs the question: Why bother trying to fill the gaps inherent to Burroughs' perfectly imperfect novella? Guadagnino's attempt to leave his stamp on it dulls the power that his direct adaptation does. By weaving in Burroughs' life itself, inextricably linking the character with the writer in a way that feels more like one man's musings about his Last Words rather than his writing itself, it does a disservice to the author as much as the audience. Perhaps it makes sense that a man as full of contradiction as William S. Burroughs gets an adaptation as conflicted in its own design as this one. Just as Lee projects his fantasies onto Allerton, so too do Guadagnino and Kuritzkes project their own questionable idea of what Burroughs was like into Lee. As the film ends, you may wonder why it took the route it did, but, just like Lee, at least you have fond memories of the past to keep you warm through the night.

Queer. Starring Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Henry Zaga, and Omar Apollo. Written by Justin Kuritzkes. Directed by Luca Guadagnino. 137 minutes. Rated R. Opens Friday, December 13; check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/showtimes.