Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Omar Apollo
Hot off the commercial and critical success of Challengers, Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino is back with another homoerotic banger. While Challengers’ ending is a fun, sexy, adrenaline rush, Queer’s ending will leave you with the gut punch of post-nut clarity. The line, “I’m disembodied,” left me in a state of melancholy that still haunts me to this day. Queer is dark, mysterious, moody, abstract, yearning, heartache, and most of all, curiosity. Curiosity in experimenting with your sexuality, and curiosity in knowing a person’s true sexuality. The former depicted by the bi-curious Eugene (Drew Starkey) and the latter by Lee (Daniel Craig). Based on the 1985 novella of the same name by William S. Burroughs, Queer is an exploration into how we identify ourselves, the inability to authentically communicate, the exploits of gentrification, and the toll of addiction in mind and body.
I will start off by saying that, when it comes to using music in his movies, Luca Guadagnino does not fucking miss. The use of Nirvana’s music is a genius move, as he opens the film with a title sequence to the tune of Sinéad O'Connor’s cover of All Apologies. Nirvana frontman and queer icon Kurt Cobain was famous for having his sexuality questioned, not just by reporters but by family and friends all throughout his life. Instead of using dialogue to introduce the setting, Luca decides to use Come As You Are as the camera slowly pans along the evening streets of 1950s Mexico City where there’s debauchery, cock fighting, and Lee with a new twink in his sights. Other needle drop highlights include New Order’s Leave Me Alone, and Omar Apollo’s Te Maldigo, with the latter artist making a brief cameo in the film.
This side of Mexico City is not too dissimilar to gentrified neighbourhoods you see today. Queer gringos roam the streets, drown themselves in cheap liquor, undercut the local taxi drivers, and spend what remains of their G.I. Bill benefits on male prostitutes. They have their cake, and they loudly eat it too. It is essentially Disneyland for those with a drinking problem and an insatiable appetite for sexual promiscuity. Lee is one of many American expatriates who now linger around looking for a quick fix to fill the insecurities in their lives. A former soldier, recovering heroin addict, and now an alcoholic, he is an intriguing but miserable figure to observe. He embarrasses himself at parties and at bars as he pathetically tries to win the affections of Eugene Allerton. His close friend Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzmnn) offers comedic relief as the overweight, too-gay-to-function sidekick and tells stories about losing his typewriter to a closeted Christian man, (many such cases in this town). And to contrast Lee we have the tall, lanky, wide-eyed Eugene Allerton, a bicurious man who Lee finds hard to read.
The plot in all honesty is quite simple. Lee becomes wildly obsessed with Allerton but is afraid of outright asking him if he is queer or not. But luckily for Lee, scientists from all over the world are raving about Ayahuasca, a psychedelic drug which is rumoured to have telepathic properties, allowing the user to read another person’s mind. And so the two men travel from town to town looking for the reclusive Dr. Cotter, the scientist who grows and studies the hallucinatory drug. Is Allerton queer or is he using Lee to experiment with his sexuality? Will Lee be able to overcome his addictions or will they continue to haunt him for the rest of his life? These are questions that Queer seeks to solve in its 135 minute run time.
While there is plenty of discourse about the current generation’s struggle with communication, Queer shows that it is a tale as old as time. Confessing your love for someone or coming out the closet takes a great deal of strength and is not supposed to be an easy task to do. It requires a person to be completely vulnerable and to let their guard down, while also needing complete trust in the other person. While there has been a trend of great progress in the acceptability of being queer, gay or bi, there has also been a noticeable regression in certain states and countries, adding increased danger and repercussions to these moments of vulnerability. So while it is simple for a viewer to say, “why the fuck can’t he just ask if he’s queer or not,” the added tension of asking this to someone you genuinely care about can feel insurmountable.
On the topic of homoeroticism, this is easily Luca’s most explicit film. While Twitter users were quick to share leaked videos of Drew Starkey’s character bottoming and Omar Apollo’s character going full frontal, this movie does something that few mainstream films have had the guts to do: showing authentic homosexual intercourse. While films like Call Me By Your Name would pan away, leaving us with Timothée Chalamet’s moans, Queer says, “let's show it for what it truly is.” I think no matter your opinion on the movie, depicting scenes like this with the same passion, realism, and maturity as your typical heterosexual sex scene will have a positive lasting impact on viewers who, like Allerton, may also feel confused about their sexuality. I myself appreciated Call Me By Your Name for depicting a relationship between bisexual characters in a way that made it feel okay, normal, and possible. And while it didn’t show all like Queer did, I found it to be a useful piece of media that helped answer questions about myself. These depictions are what is needed to help with the normalization of homoerotic relationships in cinema. No longer should queer viewers have to ship two male friends or clammer for a single scene with a homoerotic kiss, they deserve more than that at this point.
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