Luca Guadagnino has built a career on the kind of smouldering, aching desire that often self-destructs in the hands of beautiful people. So when he announced Queer, an adaptation of William S Burroughs’ long-unpublished semi-autobiographical novel, it was almost too perfect: a film about longing and alienation, lensed by a director who understands that unfulfilled desire is more potent than anything consummated. The film, much like Burroughs’ prose, exists in the liminal space between longing and despair, between possession and loss.Queer has been, well, divisive. It arrived at Venice trailing a haze of anticipation and scepticism, with critics either swooning over its fevered mood or rolling their eyes at its indulgences. For a filmmaker who luxuriates in style, Guadagnino steeps Queer in humid, woozy dislocation. The film unspools in a Mexico City of perpetual twilight, where lead star Daniel Craig pines after a younger and alluringly aloof Drew Starkey with the sort of doomed fixation that turns men into ghosts.

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in a still from Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
There’s a burning fervour to how Guadagnino’s writing translates desire into cinema — whether it be the sun-drenched sensuality of Call Me by Your Name, the feverish paranoia of Suspiria, or even the sweaty techno pangs of Challengers— which sees Queer as an exploration of connection rather than as a study in obsession.“I respectfully and honestly do not believe this is a movie about a destructive obsession for someone,” Guadagnino says. “Neither is it an unrequited love story. I think this is a love story of profound love. Not a profound love story, but profound love itself.”The distinction is important to him. For the Italian auteur, the film isn’t a portrait of infatuation driving a man to ruin, but of two people caught in a gravitational pull they cannot fully comprehend. Played with a throbbing vulnerability by Craig, Lee is an expatriate adrift in 1950s Mexico City, numbing himself with alcohol, sex and heroin, until he meets Eugene Allerton, the young GI played by Starkey. Their relationship is fraught, sometimes tender, often distant — Allerton’s affections are inscrutable at best, evasive at worst. Theirs is a connection dictated by misalignment, not lack of feeling.“If you pay attention, the first time we see Allerton, he is looking at Lee,” Guadagnino explains. “Lee falls in love with Allerton because Allerton is interested in him. It is not about Lee objectifying this character and wanting him so badly that he’s going to go places that will make him suffer.” He pauses, then adds, “I don’t like stalkers.”

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in a still from Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
For Starkey, the challenge of playing Allerton lay in embodying a character who is, by design, unknowable.“Allerton was a hard person to get to know,” he admits. “Which made it really tantalising, but also incredibly, incredibly fun. There’s something within him — the mechanism in him that loves someone the most also detests him at the same time. That contradiction makes for something very interesting and complex.”The contradiction is at the core of Queer. Allerton is not the kind of lover that Lee can possess, nor is he willing to be. He is, as the film suggests in its most hallucinatory moment, not queer, but disembodied — a being whose presence is always just beyond reach. Guadagnino recalls an early table read where he told the cast that this was not a film about unrequited love, but about unsynchronised love.“It’s about two people who are operating on different planes, in different spaces and times,” Starkey says. “Almost like ships in the night. Somewhere in time and space, these souls are meant to connect. But they have a hard time, for whatever reason, in this place, communicating that.”Sometimes movement says more than language ever could, and for Starkey, Queer was an exercise in movement as much as emotion. Months of rehearsals with choreographers Paul Lightfoot and Sol León shaped the prolonged moments of intimacy. “Just to have that space very early on to explore with each other, and Daniel and I embarrass ourselves in front of one another” — he glances at Guadagnino, who interjects knowingly: “I think you did embarrass yourself for like five minutes, and then you got used to it.” Starkey nods. “Yeah, exactly. The process was, in a way, a return to something primal, almost childlike. And from that vulnerability, a different kind of fluency emerged. So it was like the world’s greatest icebreaker to start with, and to continue that process throughout was invaluable.”

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in a still from Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
If Queer is about the struggle for connection, then it is also about the ways the body betrays the mind. Guadagnino, who has previously described himself as someone who has “not smoked as much as a cigarette,” found himself drawn to the film’s surrealist depictions of drug use — but as a means of accessing the psyche of his characters, rather than a stylised endorsement of Burroughs’ vices.“The problem was not the representation of the ayahuasca experience in a literal sense,” he explains, “but more about what Lee and Allerton were going to experience at that moment.”The film’s climax, set deep in the Ecuadorian jungle, is an immersive descent into the subconscious. Allerton and Lee ingest yagé, the hallucinogenic vine Burroughs pursued obsessively in real life, and the resulting sequence is haunting and hypnotic: bodies meld, hearts are vomited out, and time folds in on itself. It is a moment of radical intimacy, but also one of irreconcilable distance.When discussing the trippy sequence, Guadagnino describes a fusion — a kind of corporeal osmosis between his characters. “For us, they were going to experience the possibility of embodiment to the depth of the degrees in which they fuse into one another,” Guadagnino explains.He and long-collaborater, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, drew inspiration from artists like Francis Alÿs and Michaël Borremans (the latter even makes a cameo in the film) to produce a visual language that detaches itself from the act of consumption entirely and leans into the unraveling of the self.Similarly, his sonic vision with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on their third collaboration since Challengers, sought an interplay between romanticism and avant-garde unease. “We were thinking of Schoenberg before he discovered and played with the dodecaphony (a composition technique that uses all 12 notes of the chromatic scale equally),” Guadagnino notes, drawing a parallel to Queer’s linguistic evolution within Burroughs’ oeuvre — a classicism trembling on the precipice of radical transformation.If repression is the great theme of Queer, it is a subject that seems to fascinate Guadagnino from a safe, almost amused distance. “I think one of the tragedies of everyone, and particularly men, is being repressed and being compressed,” he muses. “And so it’s fascinating to me, not being repressed at all — and I hope not even compressed — to look at the behavior we act out to compress ourselves, to avoid the freedom of self.”When the Oscar nominations rolled in last week, Queer — alongside Guadagnino’s other 2024 effort, Challengers — was conspicuously absent from the Academy Award nominations. The snub triggered the usual post-nomination hysteria on social media: was it another case of the Academy’s queasiness around explicitly queer stories, or simply its longstanding aversion to Guadagnino’s brand of lush, uncontainable provocation?For a year that saw films like the likes of Coralie Fargaet’s The Substance push the boundaries of what an “Oscar movie” looks like, the snubbing of both of Guadagnino’s works last year feel particularly egregious. Guadagnino, for his part, seems characteristically unfazed.Still, there is an undeniable irony in the industry’s treatment of Queer. For the supposed progressiveness with which the industry has been championing our next Best Picture frontrunner, Emilia Perez, Hollywood remains hesitant when it comes to films that centre queerness without softening its edges. Queer is unapologetically erotic, defiantly opaque and entirely unwilling to cater to the sensibilities of those who would prefer their cinema palatable and neutered. Perhaps that is why it shall endure.Queer is currently available to stream on MUBI Published – January 29, 2025 07:20 pm IST