Dreamy, sensual, dirty. The stuff of fantasies, and fears. How much love can you take? How long will you reach out, grasping for a moment of intimacy, before you break? Queer (2024), the second collaboration between director Luca Guadgnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, demands no answers to its questions. Dripping and oozing with style, this film is messy, sticky–like a dirty rag. The film opens with the thrumming bassline of Sinéad O’Connor’s “All Apologies,” her haunting voice floating over the shots of an unmade bed, the accouterments of life strewn across. We see a typewritten manuscript, describing the main character, Lee, at the top. This is not real life. This is a story. A story of two people crashing into one another, and the bloody gore of their collision left for the world to see, beautiful in all its absurdity.
Queer in and of itself is improbable. Based on a 1985 book by William S. Burroughs, published thirty years after it was written–this story has traveled across time, survived its author to find itself translated to screen, unflinching in its revelation of the sordid and beautiful, the unapologetically queer and weird. Burroughs, a gay man who survived the AIDS epidemic, haunts the film like a ghost, a spectre raised from the dead by Guadagnino’s deft filmmaking. From the costuming evoking Burroughs’ own dress to other subtle references to his marriage and his writing in the surreal, meta moments, the viewer can feel Burrough’s presence throughout the film. There are too many gorgeous shots to count, at once arresting and heartbreaking in the bygone era of 1950s Mexico they evoke. Where another film might get lost in its own grandiose style, Queer nevertheless grounds itself in the slippery, uncomfortable humanity of its protagonists.
Ultimately, Queer is about sex. And love. And love and sex, the distances and the tensions between the two. The film isn’t for everyone; maybe it’s not even for most. This is the most surreal of Guadagnino’s works as it constructs a dreamlike world of impossibly purple nights and brilliant days, with vistas like the painted backdrops of Old Hollywood. We are first introduced to William Lee, an unsavory expat haunting the bars of 1950s Mexico City looking for the next young man to fuck. Lee, played by Daniel Craig, is like a loaded gun: violent, with the potential for destruction in his every movement. Craig utterly disappears into his character; Lee does not walk, he stalks. He does not drink, he downs. He does not love, he devours. For all his posturing, braggadocio, and attempted suaveness, he is deeply insecure, wanting, and desiring. And in that overwhelming yearning is the cruel irony of this doomed story. No matter the force of one’s desire, it cannot help but yield to its object. There are always two in this equation, even if one doesn’t want to be.
Enter Eugene Allerton. Tall, lithe, undeniably beautiful. The object of all unresolved desires, all frustrated love. Portrayed expertly by Drew Starkey, Allerton says little, he reveals less, and yet he draws the viewer inexorably in, just like Lee, until he is impossible to ignore. Across from a powerhouse such as Craig, the subtlety of Starkey’s performance nevertheless conveys a quiet magnetism that subsumes each scene he’s in. By turns innocent and cruel, Lee pursues and Allerton acquiesces, leading to the unstable orbit that is the beating heart of the film.
Therein lies the titular queerness of Queer. You consign yourself to fleeting moments of intimacy and connection–one-off trysts and volatile relationships–that last until the pressing exigencies of heterosexual society crash back in. And yet, you are still unable to destroy that hunger for love, to know someone else like your own soul. Despite the surreal interludes, this is all too real. Is this clarity of connection and unimpeded communication impossible, or just improbable? Or can it just not happen to me?
While Queer offers no clear answer, the moments of clarity and transcendent communication are in the inevitable sex scenes. There is no fade to black or cut to a window here. Intense yet tender, accompanied by the beautiful score composed by the duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, these scenes are all-consuming, wet, hot, and palpably real. Take the nervous apprehension when Allerton sits on Lee’s bed. Or Lee’s self-conscious laugh after the fact, almost compulsively turning to light his cigarette so he has an excuse to look away. Sex is embarrassing. And yet if we want any hope of connection we must pry ourselves open, lay out our most disgusting, hated parts of ourselves for the judgement of another. There is no guarantee that they will be returned. We can only be sure that we will be changed.
The push and pull, the ebb and flow of Lee and Allerton’s relationship crashes and crescendos until the third act, cut through with (dreams? hallucinations? Lynchian messages from the beyond?) scenes of indecipherable symbols, culminating in an ayahuasca trip in the Ecuadorian jungle. This is the climax of the film’s daring; where the viewer must surrender to the experience, or else risk losing it entirely (it’s okay, some might). And yet on this razor’s edge between unreality and unknowability, the film asks its final and most important question: will you look in that mirror, face the terror of truly knowing yourself, or will you look away? But like the ouroboros—the snake who eats its own tail—in knowing yourself, you must destroy yourself, too.
Queer does not shy away from the uncomfortable realities of desire. From its surreal sequences to expert use of Nirvana songs, it is beautiful and unique, a glorious fever dream of love and sex. But underneath it all, it's a story of two men, two people, two lovers, grasping for something that is just out of reach. Queer will challenge you, it will confuse you, and it will change you, but above all else, it will ask you to turn deep within yourself and love.
Rating: INDY
Ariana Hameed is a junior in the College double-majoring in American Studies and Computer Science, Ethics, and Society.
Comments