Queer on Film

After Luca Guadagnino finished William S. Burroughs’ 1985 novel Queer as a teenager, the director could not put it out of his head. The book is slim, unfinished, and thinly veiled as fiction. Anchored in 1950s Mexico City, it reflects the writer’s time in Central America and his relationship with both heroin and a younger expat student. Its wonderfully strange nature attracted Guadagnino, who first set out to adapt it for the screen at 21, and now, more than 30 years later is doing so by way of A24. Led by a charmingly disheveled Daniel Craig (the James Bond series and the 2019 whodunnit Knives Out) and plaintive Drew Starkey, of Outer Banks (2020-present) fame—plus a a cameo by Omar Apollo—Queer begins its theatrical run today after a successful world premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where it earned a 9-minute standing ovation.

Desire, as in all of Guadagnino’s films,  plays a pivotal role in the new movie. In Queer’s opening sequence, the drifting expat veteran William Lee (Craig) slumps out of a den of shadows and onto the street. He wears a soft linen suit with wrinkles that mirror the lines engraved in his face. Smoke from his cigarette drifts upward as he lays eyes on a beautiful young man, rosy and aglow. Not even the raucous cock fight between them can distract Lee from Eugene Allerton (Starkey), another American expat studying in the city. The pair share a glance and a deep craving is born within Lee, who becomes fixated on the young man with whom he feels instantly and intensely connected.

Often, Guadagnino’s filmic desire balloons into cathartic and at times raucous or obscene behavior. It makes sense then that he was drawn to Burroughs’ novel, which was written between 1951 and 1953 but was left unpublished until the mid-‘80s after the gay rights movement helped slacken obscenity laws. In the novel’s introduction, Burroughs credited heroin for keeping everything hemmed in: sex drive and appetite, emotional reaction and personal connection. “On junk I was insulated, didn't drink, didn't go out much, just shot up and waited for the next shot,” he wrote. “When the cover is removed, everything that has been held in check by junk spills out.” Similarly in the novel, the strength of Lee’s desire for Richard transforms him, and his once capped instincts are set free.

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In his exploration of the holes left in Burroughs’ plot, Guadagnino set out to imagine the psychedelic trip at the novel’s end that the author didn’t write. To do so, he tapped playwright Justin Kuritzkes, whose debut feature film, Challengers, was directed by Guadagnino and released by Amazon MGM Studios earlier this year to critical and popular success. Although incomplete, the novel tackled the transformative power of love, connection, and fierce longing, as well as where those forces meet their breaking point.

While not of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, 1968, fame, the work is smaller, more sensitive, and closer to the author, who was beginning to write about his sexuality for the first time. In its adaptation, shrunken buildings, winding paths, deep hues and vibrant neons make up the artificial world that Burroughs’ projected fantasies were made of, staged by production designer Stefano Baisi. And Guadagnino’s long-time collaborator, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom—Call Me by Your Name (2017), Suspiria (2018), Challengers—underscored the film’s surrealist quality with his masterful command of lighting. The result? A revelatory work of adaptation and another desirous addition to Guadagnino’s sensual body of work.