QUEER (2024)
Thursday, February 13 | 7 pm
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Country of Origin: Italy / U.S.A.
Language: English
Runtime: 135
It’s been quite a 2024 for director Luca Guadagnino, whose sexed-up tennis drama Challengers made it to several critics’ year-end best-of lists. Now comes the much different Queer, based on the novel by the Beatnik high priest William S. Burroughs (“He’s up there with the pope,” says punk songstress Patti Smith).
A thinly veiled autobiographical account of the author’s travels in Mexico and Latin America in the early ‘50s, the film features a startling about-face for its leading man, Daniel Craig…do we actually have to say that he’s the most recent James Bond? Actually, if you’re familiar with Craig’s pre-Bond work (he originated the role of closeted lawyer Stephen Dillane in the British premier of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, for instance), it’s not a stretch at all, but more of a return to form. It’s a fabulous performance—“played with sensitivity and predatory heat,” according to Manhola Dargis in The New York Times—that has lots of Oscar buzz about it.
The film focuses on Lee’s relationship with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), and their growing infatuation. An Allen Ginsburg stand-in, played by Jason Schwartzman, pops up briefly, as well. There’s plenty of sex and drug use in the film—it’s based on a book William S. Burroughs, in case you missed that part—but it actually recalls Guadagnino’s earlier work more than, say, David Cronenberg’s wacked-out (fabulous, yes, but…wacked-out) take on Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
As Dargis explains: “By virtue of its source material, Queer is an outwardly heavier, more overtly serious and formally complicated movie than Challengers. Even so and unsurprisingly, the two are—along with Call Me By Your Name (Guadagnino’s breakthrough success with Timothée Chalamet)—of a piece in their romanticism, hermeticism and smooth visual patina.”