Queer is an 2024 gay romance drama film directed by Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, based on the 1985 novel by William S. Burroughs. Set in 1940s Mexico City, the film follows an outcast American expat William Lee (Daniel Craig) who becomes infatuated with a beautiful younger man called Eugene (Drew Starkey).
The movie, in its first half, is a luscious barbed comedy of liberation, punched along by its anachronistic music choices (Nirvana, Prince, New Order). Lee, who calls himself a “man of independent means” (he has family money), is content to live this life of pleasure and indolence, to revel in his addictions. The Mexico City queer scene we see is both squalid and a kind of paradise. The men share their cruising stories and bitch at each other with bitter understanding.
In its second half, turns into a very different movie, a trippy road comedy about the search for mind-altering transcendence, because Lee wants to find the fabled hallucinogen yage, or ayahuasca, because he’s heard it gives the user telepathic powers and he wants to discover what Eugene really thinks and feels about him. Even as film sinks into a kind of torpor, it is also a fulfillment of the film’s vision of Burroughs, and of queer love.
Asked about the film, Craig said “I always felt that Burroughs had a very public face, and I wanted to know what the private part of him was like,” said Craig, who spoke to a few people who knew him. “I think in ‘Queer’ you sort of see more of that than you do in his other books.”
“There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene … we just wanted to make it as touching and as real and as natural as we possibly could,” Craig said. “Drew is a wonderful, beautiful, fantastic actor to work with. We kind of had a laugh. We tried to make it fun,” he added.
Queer premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, in-competition for the Golden Lion, and the movie earned 11-minute ovation.
Watch the trailer below:
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