Desire isn’t just a feeling, it’s also a shape, a silhouette traced in the air with smoke, an empty, aching border waiting to be filled in. And once you slake desire, it’s gone—it has transformed into something else, something more solid than a question mark but a lot less interesting. The shape of desire is everywhere in Luca Guadagnino’s shimmering, tender-as-a-bruise Queer, playing in competition at the Venice Film Festival. Guadagnino and co-writer Justin Kuritzkes have adapted the screenplay from William Burroughs’ autobiographical novel of the same name, written in 1952 but not published until 1985. Daniel Craig is Burroughs’ stand-in here—his character’s name is Bill Lee, a version of the pen name Burroughs himself used at one time—and his complex, mercurial performance is the key to the movie. Sometimes you want to shake him—but damned if he doesn’t also draw out a multitude of undefinable feelings, including grudging protectiveness.
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Guadagnino drops us right into Lee’s world—he’s a sexual adventurer swaggering through postwar Mexico City. He tries, halfheartedly, to seduce a guileless-looking young American, but thinks better of it when he sees a gold Star of David hanging around his neck. “Your mother wouldn’t like it,” he says decisively, and more than a little derisively. Part of the game for him is determining who’s “queer” and who isn’t—but even then, there’s often some wiggle room. His hangout of choice is a watering hole called the Ship Ahoy, and as a man of independent means, his job, apparently, consists solely of finding people to sleep with. He’s bleary and dissolute, always on the make. His sexual energy is practically a visible aura; every molecule of his being is aquiver.
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Sometimes he strikes out, but often he scores—no sooner has he completed one assignation than he sets out in search of another. And then he sees a willowy young man—bespectacled, clean-shaven, intelligent-looking—and falls into a kind of love. He’s ignored at first, so he tries harder. Eventually, he and this new conquest lock eyes from opposite sides of a cockfight, a heavily symbolic meet-cute if ever there were one. Eventually, they sit down for a drink. The object of Lee’s affection keeps talking and talking—the effect is something like “blah blah counter-intelligence something blah blah”—while Lee listens, rapt as a lovesick schoolboy. We see the ghost of his arm reaching out to stroke his new friend’s hair, though it’s an illusion, a fantasy, a move he doesn’t dare attempt, an ectoplasmic manifestation of his longing. Eventually, they do go to bed; the sex is steamy, ardent, musky. And suddenly Lee, who we’ve come to believe is just a scrappy, libidinous opportunist, is a goner. His yearning hangs in the air like too-strong after-shave. No matter how you feel about Burroughs—or his work, so often laced with acidity—Craig’s performance might shift your view, at least a little.
The guy Lee has fallen so hard for is maybe-straightish Eugene Allerton (played, with just the right amount of semi-opaque indifference, by Drew Starkey). The rest of Queer maps their cat-and-mouse relationship, one in which Lee is always the one left wanting more. He persuades Allerton to accompany him on a trip to South America—actually, he nearly begs him. But the trip is shaky from the start. Lee is a junkie, and his abject neediness as he goes through a withdrawal is a major turnoff for Allerton. Somehow, they patch things up, and Allerton agrees to accompany Lee deep into the jungle, where he hopes to source, and imbibe, some yage, or ayahuasca, a plant-sourced beverage said to enhance telepathic sensitivity. A reclusive jungle botanist weirdo (played by Lesley Manville, in a long, lank wig) sets the two of them up with some of this magic tea. At first, they believe its effects to be zero. Next thing you know, their palms are glowing red as if illuminated by internal stigmata; when they embrace, their limbs don’t just entwine, they melt together. The effect is radiant, enchanting, erotic.
Guadagnino seems to be having fun with this special-effects magic. And although his last film, the love-triangle escapade Challengers, was widely deemed “sexy,” it wasn’t particularly sensual. Queer is different; its nerve endings are alive. That’s largely thanks to Craig, who offers himself up as an unequivocal sex object. The film was shot by Guadagnino’s regular collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who makes the fantasy sequences feel vital and real and the more realistic elements feel vaguely dreamy. And Mukdeeprom knows how to capture Craig’s particular brand of earthy, frowning beauty. Even the stubble on his chin looks faintly luminous, like frost on a blade of grass.
Though Guadagnino is a gifted director, his style is sometimes showily baroque to a fault. (Exhibit A: Suspiria.) But Queer, stylish as it is, may be his most heartfelt movie, at least since Call Me By Your Name. For one thing, it’s set in a time before people had a term for what we now call identity politics—but you can bet their identities meant everything to them, especially in a world where revealing their truest selves could often get them beaten up or, worse, killed. At one point, in the middle of a heroin-induced reverie, Lee explains himself in a phrase that captures the universality of human longing and sexual desire, detached from that thing we conveniently call sexual orientation: “I’m not queer, I’m disembodied.” And in that vein, Guadagnino has made a movie that feels strangely buoyant—as sexually explicit as it is, it’s almost more spiritually explicit. Craig’s Lee is a pilgrim in search of pleasure, sensation, satiety. He doesn’t dare ask for love. But with his ghost limbs, he’s reaching out for it even so.
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