‘Queer’
Address: Luca Guadagnino
Performers: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman and Omar Apollo
Premiere: January 1, 2025
★★★★
Luca Guadagnino runs in ‘queer‘ a risk, although perhaps he does not experience it as such: adapting an author like William S. Burroughs without the intention of sacrificing his mannerism, his aesthetic whims and his attraction to experiment to be faithful to him. Does that mean that you are moving away from ‘Queer’, the novel you adapt? Not at all. There is no doubt that the director of ‘Call Me by Your Name’ (2017) knows, understands and loves Burroughs’ literature. But, instead of putting oneself strictly at the service of the text, of trying translate into images the brutal, dirty and stark universe of the authorapply a own view.
The result is a strange crossing of authorships, which do not always match, but fascinating. Divided into three chapters and an epilogue‘Queer’ begins in Mexico in 1951 and follows in the footsteps of William Lee (Daniel Craig), an American writer. The appearance of a young ex-soldier (Drew Starkey) will mean a painful journey of self-discovery for him. That trip is many trips, which Guadagnino films in different ways. ‘Queer’ is a succession of trips (sometimes overlapping) to the same places: desire, identity and impossible love. There are physical, mental, dreamlike, alcoholic and hallucinogenic. And Guadagnino, even to say the calmest, experiments with form (what a strange way of planning, what unconventional editing decisions). The experiment is more striking in the third part and in the prologue, but the formal game, not always satisfactory, dominates the whole and gives rise to a film that seeks in the I play with images and sounds ways of representing the complexities of desire.
