Queer: Luca Guadagnino finds romance in William S. Burroughs’ story of obsession and squalor

During the opening titles of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, the camera wanders over an old-fashioned mattress, striped in pale blue, with buttons holding its tufts of stuffing in place. On it is strewn a variety of midcentury-antique items that evoke not just the 1950s setting but the notorious life of William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation writer on whose novel it is based. There’s brown liquor, a typewriter, drug paraphernalia, a small arsenal of handguns. It makes a kind of museum exhibit out of the squalid details that grit the pages of Burroughs’ writings, with the telling discrepancy that here, the mattress is pristine, as though the sweat, semen, blood and bile that stains so much of the writer’s difficult, lacerating work has been laundered away by Guadagnino’s more modern but also more romantic sensibility. 

Queer takes an often self-consciously repellent text and turns it into a tragic fantasy about the loneliness of unreciprocated gay love. Straddling this gulf is a tough task, managed largely by a brilliant Daniel Craig, playing Bill Lee (Burroughs’ autofictional avatar) a perspiring geezer in a ratty linen suit who has washed up in Mexico City where he drinks and dopes his days away, between sexual encounters of the casually predatory, chase-and-conquest variety. That changes the first time he sees glowing, clean-cut, sexually ambivalent Allerton (an excellent, self-possessed Drew Starkey). Lee, whom Craig imbues with a very un-James-Bond-like neediness, is besotted, despite being warned off by his barfly acquaintances (including a priceless Jason Schwartzman as a schlubby Ginsberg-type hilariously resigned to being ripped off by his rough-trade pickups), and develops a fixation on Allerton that long outlasts their first night together. 

Compared to Call Me By Your Name (2017), with its dainty pan to the window, the sex scenes in Queer are frank and full-frontal. But that’s only within the constructed reality of the movie: the Mexico City of Queer is pungently artificial, a pastel-painted soundstage that’s more a creation of Lee’s feverish imagination than a recreation of a real place. This approach allows Guadagnino and regular DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom some moments of deliriously heightened loveliness, as when pale purple blossoms burst across the frame behind Lee and Allerton, or when Lee’s yearning for intimacy translates into a semi-dissolve of an imagined caress or a phantom embrace. 

But it also quarantines the film from the darker transgressions of the original text – perhaps understandably, when much of what makes the novel subversive is how it both scorns and plays upon now-outmoded attitudes toward queer desire. First written in the early 1950s, the book was published in the mid-80s, and forty years after that again the movie – made by a gay director at the height of his mainstream success – is released into a world with different values and taboos. 

So it’s when it departs from the text, or adds anachronistic flourishes like several spectacularly well-selected Nirvana and Prince tracks, that Queer is most interesting. Eventually Lee persuades his paramour to travel with him into the jungle in search of the psychotropic ayahuasca. This journey is fruitless in the novel, but here, after some oddly wacky interludes, aided by an unrecognisable Lesley Manville as a jungle-guru, they find and take the drug. In bad-trip imagery reminiscent of Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, flesh meets flesh in a striking interpretation of lust as a drive to literally burrow into a lover’s body and live under their skin. 

The film ends on a radical departure too. Burroughs’ infamous (allegedly accidental) killing of his wife Joan Vollmer is reworked in a hallucinatory epilogue, which essentially makes this doomed affair with Allerton – also based on a real person – into the defining trauma of his life. It’s a shift that ennobles movie-Lee, as though Guadagnino wants to rescue him from the narcissistic yet self-loathing register Burroughs wrote in while awaiting trial for Vollmer’s homicide, and it’s debatable whether it’s an improvement, a fatal flaw that dubiously erases Vollmer, or a necessary concession to changing times. But like the version of Nirvana’s All Apologies that opens the film, in which Sinead O’Connor’s breathy voice takes the sneer out of Kurt Cobain’s vocals and turns a sarcastic song into a haunting ballad, Guadagnino’s Queer is less an adaptation than a cover that changes the original mood and meaning. Instead of a grimy tale of illicit obsession, internalised revulsion and squalor, we get a tragedy written in the aching poetry of disappointed gay desire, in which the mattresses remain clean because the mess is mostly metaphorical. Here, when Lee throws up, he does it in a dream-state, and he vomits up his heart. 

► Queer screened as a Special Presentation at BFI London Film Festival.