Queer
)
)
)
"I want to talk to you, without speaking"
Overview
Bold, horny and achingly melancholic, Queer is a sensual search for human connection. In late 1950s Mexico City, dissolute writer Bill Lee (Daniel Craig, playing a William S. Burroughs stand in) spends his days wandering the dusty streets and his nights drinking in bars with a small community of fellow gay American ex-pats. His solitary existence is upended when he catches sight of Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a bewitching yet aloof former GI who may or may not share Lee's proclivities. The two embark on a complex, messy affair unbalanced not just by their difference in age and circumstances, but by a fundamental difference in how they see the world— leading them on a journey south in search of a substance that is rumoured to open the doors of perception and make all communication possible.
“Luca Guadagnino meets William S. Burroughs on the iconoclast’s own slippery terms and the result is mesmerising.”
“A tiny masterpiece... so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin”
“Daniel Craig is strangely magnificent...needy, horny and mesmeric in Guadagnino’s erotic drama”
Why You Should See This Film
Guadagnino has described this as his most personal film, one he's wanted to adapt since reading the unfinished novella Queer when he was 17 years old. The spirit of Burroughs, notorious 20th century iconoclast and author of Naked Lunch, runs thick through the ideas and images, manifesting in surreal dream-like sequences that occasionally veer into the nightmarish. DOP Mukdeeprom (who also shot Challengers) finds a way to make Burroughs' inimitable text into searing images, with Craig in a career-best performance as an avatar of agonised longing. A film out of time in the best possible way, Queer is a sweaty, sordid, boozy antidote to the sanitised depictions of queer desire that offers no easy answers, but invites a look within.
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)