Queer is a story of lost love and last love and mad-about-the-boy obsession, featuring an excellent performance from Daniel Craig – needy, horny, moody, like his Knives Out detective Benoit Blanc on steroids and with something of his portrayal of Ted Hughes from 2003’s Sylvia.
It’s adapted by screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes from the autobiographical novel by William Burroughs, directed by Luca Guadagnino and wonderfully shot by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom with digitally rendered landscapes and streetscapes that bring the boozy, bleary reality into alignment with the many (disquieting) dream sequences.
Craig is Lee, an expatriate American based on Burroughs himself – the resemblance is made more overt in a Kubrickian sequence giving him a succession of hallucinatory flashforwards into old age. Lee lives cheaply and indolently in Mexico City after the second world war, hanging around bars, drinking, doing drugs and picking up guys – he is queer, and the word here (in a movie set in the 50s, from a book published in the 80s) might complicate still further the issue of when the word shed its derogatory overtones. Lee conceives a passionate obsession with Gene (Drew Starkey), a handsome American who appears to be straight but attracted to Lee.
Together they go on a weird holiday to South America, because Lee wants to try the fabled hallucinogen yage, or ayahuasca, because he’s heard it gives the user telepathic powers and – poignantly enough – he wants to discover what Gene really thinks and feels about him. It’s a bizarre and uproarious journey into the jungle whose comedy briefly annuls the pain of what he suspects is unrequited love and brings the two into contact with a fierce, reclusive, gun-totin’, snake-wranglin’ scientist and yage expert – a show-stopping cameo for Lesley Manville. There are luxury-cinephile walk-ons for directors David Lowery and Lisandro Alonso.
Craig always commands the screen in his regulation honorary consul crumpled white suit, hat, glasses and a pistol that he bizarrely carries around openly holstered, a droll phallic symbol for this erotic cowboy who is very much a lover not a fighter.
Guadagnino shows that this is an eroticism of the streets: Lee spends so much of his time walking from bar to bar, or – with a guy – from a bar to a hotel. (There’s a great sequence when Lee walks to the accompaniment of Nirvana’s Come As You Are and that track never sounded more purely sensual.)
He hangs out with other guys in the same situation as him, chiefly the witty, dyspeptic Frank (Jason Schwartzman), but Lee is special: he seems more like an artist, although whatever artistry this is, it appears, like Wilde’s genius, to be put into his life, or his bed. Craig’s Lee is always sure of himself, somehow even when he’s utterly distraught: when a doctor sternly tells him to give up drugs, Lee sheepishly says that, yes, he really should, but this is only so that this doctor will prescribe some emergency opiates in the meanwhile – he has no intention of actually modifying his own behaviour.
It is a really funny, open, generous performance – perhaps the only disadvantage is that he upstages Starkey, just a little, and his mesmeric screen presence will draw our attention back to Lee, away from Gene and his ambiguous intentions and emotions. Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.