Review: QUEER

Bill Lee, an expat drinking his days long in Mexico City. There aren't a lot of spots in town to pick up the guys he wants but he kind of gets by. Then, when a flawless beautiful young man Gene appears on the scene Bill is not only struck but confused by the guy's sexuality. This will take some courting. Even after his breakthrough, the situation does not clear up and they continue on with a love that is nothing if not conditional. It might be time to see about that shared experience everyone says is good for that.

Luca Guadagnino's film of William Burroughs' novella is largely faithful to the source, evoking the sense of ex-patriot life and Lee's yearning for everything he thought his opiate dependency would bring him: love. "Love," wrote Burroughs, "is the most natural painkiller ..." Lee, running from deeds and events from his recent life in the U.S. is in constant pain. Gene is both a bridge to analgesia and a fulfilment of his suffering. When he finds it, it is hot and cold and needs constant nurture, just like every other dissapointing thing he has known.

Guadagnino lays is on with a trowel, offering us glimpses of the romance of vintage do it yourself travel in locations of strong but flawed beauty all the way to a massive hallucinatory communion. His choices of sourced music (or music makers as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross take over, there) and a master cinematographer serve him well again. My problem is at base level: the writing.

As usual, you could lose about forty minutes of this film and not know it. More, you would emerge with a refreshing character study and things to take away about the numberless facets of love. Burroughs himself did that in a book that was less than two hundred pages. You might think that a film that takes almost two and a half hours to say this must have further cinematic material to explore this but it doesn't, really. While repetition and behavioural looping can be read as valid expressions of the ennui and frustration of navigating love, there is so much on screen here as to appear oppressive to the point where it becomes boring.

This despite the efforts of Daniel Craig as Lee who shows with strength and great skill how such a mean minded monster can appear attractive (and thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, he doesn't attempt a Burroughs impersonation). Drew Starkey is clearly more than his looks. Jason Schwartzman has learned real acting. And so on. But the slow roll and roll flattens all the good grace the film began with.

Queer is an early work by Burroughs. It was published in the '80s but finished in the '50s, held back by Burroughs himself. The prose, while highly seasoned with Burroughs' characteristic sharpness of observation, black humour and genuine emotion, is startlingly conventional. It is not the borderless blend of satire and dream sequences that the much later Naked Lunch is; it reads very easily and does its work as well as any airport novel (like its predecessor Junkie). There is a dream sequence at the end but it is heartrending rather than confronting. 

Guadagnino has made no bones about how much he has lifted from Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch. Towards the end it feels like a cover version. Yes, yes, postmodernism and all that, but Cronenberg earned his take on a difficult book by making a creditable companion piece that allows both book and film to co-exist without sparks. Queer's plundering of this feels bitchy and undermines its own originality.

There is a lot to enjoy here but like every other Guadagnino film I've seen, it would benefit from tightness and focus. By now the lack of both are entrenched in his style and it would take a massively successful contrary case to change that.