Queer ** (2024, Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henry Zaga, Omar Apollo, Lesley Manville) – Classic Movie Review 13,365

Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film Queer is a gruelling endurance test, despite a 100 per cent committed performance by Daniel Craig as tormented gay William Lee, and stunning studio artwork re-creating 1950s Mexico City.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film Queer is a gruelling endurance test, despite a 100 per cent committed performance by Daniel Craig as tormented gay William Lee, and stunning studio artwork re-creating 1950s Mexico City filmed at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, Italy.

The tedious screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes is based on William S Burroughs’s 1985 novella, which was published unfinished, so Kuritzkes and Guadagnino had to come up with their own ending. The book isn’t exactly plot driven and the film needed a plot, quite a challenge for Kuritzkes and Guadagnino.

Okay, also on the plus side, the film does look absolutely brilliant thanks to the cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and the music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is in the interesting category.

Daniel Craig stars as the outcast American ex-patriate William Lee, a fictionalised version of the American Beat Generation writer William S Burroughs, living in 1950s Mexico City who spends his time boozing and cruising in bars and enjoying sex with younger men.

He becomes infatuated with a handsome, very much younger man, Eugene Allerton ((Drew Starkey), a GI in his early twenties. Lee pursues Allerton and they start a relationship, but Allerton keeps his distance, maintains he isn’t really ‘queer’, and is often seen with a woman.

Yet Allerton inexplicably agrees to travel with Lee to South America on an adventure to finding yagé, a plant offering telepathic abilities. They arrive in the Ecuadorian jungle to meet Dr Cotter, a crazy expert in the plant.

Yes, it’s a druggie version of Death in Venice, but at least in that film the ‘hero’ had the good manners to die (hence the title!).

[Spoiler alert] Here, in a bathetic post-script scene two years later, William Lee is alive and relatively well, apparently not particularly bothered about all the emotional mess we have endured with him for the last two hours or so. Ah, well, easy come easy go. To be fair, he does find out what might have happened to Allerton. This unintentional effect of anti-climax leaves the viewer feeling totally cheated of all the effort and waste of time in watching the movie.

[Spoiler alert] Or, maybe he is bothered. He dreams of shooting Allerton in the head with a bow in a drunken game of William Tell and holding his body till both of them vanish. Finally, Lee is old, seeing the young Allerton cradling him as he dies.

Oh, and yes, we’ve got bits of Naked Lunch (1991) thrown in too, another cheerless experience.

Lesley Manville turns up unexpectedly and (luckily for her) unrecognisably as Dr Cotter, definitely cheering things up briefly in her crazy (and pointless) little episode. Jason Schwartzman is unrecognisable too as Allerton’s long-suffering bar buddy Joe Guidry, but he can’t do anything to cheer things up. Drew Starkey fits the bill exactly, but he has about as much acting to do as Björn Andrésen as Tadzio in Death in Venice,

The sex in the film, as the film is partly about sex, is fairly explicit, with Craig and Starkey putting themselves through it quite diligently, though it is entirely unsexy.

Maybe it means well, but this feels like a gay film for people who don’t really like gays very much. It seems very old fashioned, and a relic of another, even worse era. But then Burroughs’s life and writings are also quite troubling too.

Burroughs doesn’t seem like a very nice person, and the film has a big problem in that its ‘hero’ doesn’t seem like a very nice person either, so why should we care?

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997).

Talking Venice, Queer premiered in-competition on 3 September 2024 at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

Incredibly, there was more. The original cut submitted to and accepted by the Venice Film Festival was up to 200 minutes long before being cut to 137 minutes.

Allerton is based on Adelbert Lewis Marker (1930–1998), a then recently discharged US Navy serviceman from Jacksonville, Florida, who made friends with Burroughs in Mexico City.

Non-studio scenes were shot in Quito, Ecuador.

On 6 September 1951, Burroughs shot and killed his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in the head, allegedly in a drunken game of William Tell at a drinking party at a friend’s apartment in Mexico City.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,365

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