Let’s face it. Almost all of Luca Guadagnino’s reputation as an audacious auteur hinges on Call Me By Your Name. Since then, Luca has made an underwhelming tennis triangle The Challengers where I wasn’t sure the men loved the women or each other.
The gay drama Queer features a true blue superstar, Mr. Bond Daniel Craig himself, bonding with the boys.
This is Mexico in the 1950s, and the stench of periodicity and decadence hits you hard as author William Lee (Daniel Craig) cruises the bars, thereby raising the bar for his performing report. It is indeed a brave performance, though not in a look-what-I-can-do way, but in a quietly uninhibited way.
Lee’s initial wooing of the young wiry bi-sexual Eugene Allerton (an impressively languid Drew Starkey) reeks of the musk of debauchery. Yup, this is a world of cruisers and boozards that Luca Guadagnino knows well, perhaps even better than author William Burroughs on whose novella this film is based.
The free-falling degeneracy of Mexico in the 1950s gives Lee and his ilk the licence to be freely licentious. The director captures that world of immeasurable appetites with a prickly cheekiness.
But then the narration begins to get restless. Lee wants to travel, and not alone. He wants to take Eugene on a long trip to South America. There is desperation in Lee’s plea as he offers to not only fund Eugene’s trip but also ensure no conditions apply. This, in practical terms, means Eugene doesn’t have to sleep with Lee.
Unlimited freedom has always been at the core of all art cinema and drama of decadence. Queer goes a step further. It removes the protagonist from his horny habitat and follows him into an out-of-body experience in the jungles of South America.
Henceforth, Queer becomes a kaleidoscope of directorial self-indulgence with contorted disembodied images representing a world gone largely askew.
It is a world snarled in contradictions and not beautiful to behold. Queer is a problematic view of homoeroticism filled with an unexpressed anguish. It has seeds of significance wedged in the welters of hedonism. And some notable performances. But at the end we are none the wiser about the demons that inhabit the protagonist’s mind. And we don’t care.
