Guadagnino is one in a million, and QUEER is a reflection of that

"The difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you."

William Lee, Queer's eccentric broken protagonist played by a magnificent Daniel Craig like I've never seen before, utters these words crestfallen and with a frozen sadness in his eyes. The passage of time, the wounds and the pain of failing to complete himself can be noticed in his demeanor and fake positive attitude. The fact is that this man who craves young meat—in the most poetic sense of the word if there's any—feels like an actual queer from the very beginning to even the final seconds of Italian Luca Guadagnino's new movie. But don't get me wrong, since I have also misinterpreted the word my whole life. I thought that being "queer" meant being gay and, actually, it's something far more profound than that.

Feeling alone, helpless, empty. On a much more human and less identity-related level, being queer—according to some interpretations—can also mean being "peculiar." Someone who can't stick to the established social rules and is on a constant self-discovery journey. And our protagonist has many of these characteristics, which Guadagnino is no stranger to since he began his star career in 2017 after the premiere of Call Me by Your Name, depicting characters looking for themselves among the crowd. Who are we, and who do we want to be? Based on William S. Burroughs's homonymous novel, the story, which has been on Luca's mind since he was 20 years old, follows this American expatriate who spends his days and nights bar hopping in a Mexican city set in the 50s, desperately looking for someone to embrace him while he surrounds himself with old acquaintances, trying not to lose his adventurous spirit in heroine and the bitterness of loneliness.

With a visual style worthy of Burroughs' magical realism vision—which he would later enhance with surrealism in The Naked Lunch, his pinnacle work that David Cronenberg subsequently adapted in 1993—and certain hints of the recently deceased David Lynch, Guadagnino puts us in the skin of an almost catatonic invisible man, who resorts to exposing himself unfiltered to everyone around him in the name of an impossible—let's call it—love, that apparently never comes, all because of his voracious hunger for attention. Someone who speaks, but that doesn't seem to express anything with his words, lost in a labyrinth created by himself. Craig brings this character to life with passion, fierceness and savagery but, overall, he puts his heart into a story he carries completely alone on his shoulders, containing a paradoxically blatant exploration of the pain caused by shame in the male being.

Everything changes when he encounters a young North American former soldier by chance in the most unexpected setting: a cockfight. Nirvana's "Come As You Are" plays in the background—Guadagnino's nod to the mutual respect Kurt Cobain and Burroughs shared—and, while Lee is distracted by mundane life, he finds an ending to the dead-end his life is. Eugene Allerton, pronounced as Gene according to him, represents all his ideals. He seems smart, mysterious and his childlike face exudes certain innocence. Drew Starkey builds up a peculiar strength in his acting job that requires more subtlety than dedication. He expresses himself through gazes, which assert a duality between rejection and affection, and only superficially listens to Lee while smoking a cigarette or fiddling with his clothes. What does this young man represent in the story?

Nonetheless, if there's something flawless in the movie, that's three elements. The first element we should highlight is the beautiful Mexico City Guadagnino brought to life together with the inexperienced Stefano Baisi as production designer and Monica Sallustio as art director—a wonder packed with miniatures, special effects and decorations that automatically transport us. Shot in the studio Cinecittà in Italy and some locations in Palermo and Rome, I felt Mexico was so well represented like few times before, far from the sepia tone Hollywood got us used to. In Queer, everyone feels the heat, people work with passion and aren't stigmatized for their condition. The second but not less important element is Thai Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's photography, who this year created the best fake tennis long take in history in Challengers—also directed by Guadagnino. In Queer, he goes back to the basics of exploring intimacy with a mise-en-scène that employs a multiple-camera setup as a stylistic resource together with slow motion and magnificent chiaroscuros.

The third and most important element is the script. Justin Kuritzkes, who had already collaborated with Guadagnino this year in the movie starring Zendaya and the male duo composed by O'Connor and Faist, brings to life a dream come true, in the most symbolic sense of the expression. Throughout the whole movie, we can see and feel a narrative coherence proper of great figures, which is surprising since Justin—who is also the real-life partner of the Oscar nominee Celine Song—has only worked in two films as a scriptwriter. As its core, under all the romance, there's a certain emotional contraption in Lee's character which can be considered a more profound character study than it seems. His obsession with finding yagé—or best known as ayahuasca in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru—ultimately is the means to reach an end he could never come to. Lee's destiny is to die alone, accompanied by the warmth of a bed and the coldness of knowing that happiness only lasted for a while. Like it happens to all of us…

Posted on JANUARY 28, 2024, 17:01 PM | UTC-GMT -3

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