»Queer« by Luca Guadagnino – The loneliness of unrequited gay love

In the life and work of the writer William S. Burroughs, there is a wide, wide gap between coercion and freedom. Which is probably because, of all things, it is drug addiction and sexual obsessions that will free you from all kinds of constraints. So in both cases, things or dispositions that have the nature of compulsively putting their wearer in a stranglehold. Almost the opposite of freedom. The first prerequisite for all sorts of attempts at liberation in Borroughs’ novel “Queer,” written in 1952 but only published in 1985, is a change of location. The author’s alter ego, William Lee, runs away from the USA to Mexico City. It’s easier to fix things here, and being gay is easier.

In his semi-autobiographical text, William S. Burroughs describes a search for love that is not as cold and destructive as one might think after reading the major works “Naked Lunch” and “Soft Machine”, but rather classically dark -romantic, as unfulfilled. And Luca Guadagnino highlights this aspect in his somehow brooding, gently overheated film adaptation of “Queer”. William Lee, played by James Bond (Daniel Craig), is a middle-aged man who has to give the town’s young gays money so that he can give them blowjobs. When he meets Eugene (Drew Starkey), he gets serious and his infatuation increases to the point of wanting to lose his voice.

William Lee is looking for a telepathic connection with his lover, a communication that no longer knows any boundaries and, above all, no body boundaries. The reality of this relationship is, as is so often the case, somewhat different. Whether Eugene goes to bed with Lee because he wants to or because the older man supports him financially is never entirely clear, neither to the viewer nor to the unhappily in love man.

In any case, as in “Call Me by Your Name”, Guadagnino succeeds in filming men having sex in such a way that categories such as hetero or homo, which in Burroughs’ philosophy should be understood and exploded as control measures, become latently obsolete. At the latest when James Bond’s semen runs out of the corner of his mouth, the film has all viewers who have not yet said goodbye to him internally on the side of its longing hero.

At the end of this very beautiful and very sad drug, sex and art spectacle there is a longing for something that, perhaps, cannot exist.

This isn’t for everyone: The Istanbul district government banned the screening of “Queer” at a festival in November last year, and the distributor Mubi then canceled the entire festival. Another one of those cultural-political moments in which forced heterosexuality, attempts at repression and stupidity have entered into an almost natural combination.

In the first two thirds, “Queer” shows William Lee’s search movements and his addiction, creating a realistic portrait of the queer community in Mexico City in the 1950s. A realistic impression, that’s all it is, because you weren’t there. He achieves this with images in muted colors by cameraman Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who filmed “Call Me by Your Name” over the summer and is recording here what he recorded in Slow Cinema by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“Uncle Boonmee remembers his former lives” and especially “Memoria”).

Mukdeeprom can capture the jungle as beautifully and quietly as few others can, and in the second half of “Queer” the film mutates into a road movie. William Lee and Eugene go in search of the Yage plant, a hallucinogenic drug, and unlike the literary original, Justin Kuritzkes’ script gives his hero this experience. Unlike the text, the two find Yage, and Guadagnino stages the intoxication as a visually powerful trip that dissolves the body’s boundaries, although not in the way desired, but as a continuation of David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” film adaptation.

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Guadagninos represents, first and foremost, as Jessica Kiang put it in “Sight & Sound,” a transformation of William S. Burroughs’ “self-consciously repulsive text” “into a tragic fantasy about the loneliness of unrequited gay love.” That’s what it does but also by repeatedly calling up the entire work in intertextual references. The Burroughs cosmos shines constantly: centipedes, music by Nirvana (“What else should I be? / All apologies / What else could I say? / Everyone is gay / What else could I write? I don’t have the right” ), a philosophy that sees language as a control agent and yet cannot do without it. That’s at the core of this film, the strong desire for loss of language, and it’s at this point that Williams S. Burroughs’ writing connects with the physicality of Luca Guadagnino’s other films.

Here language is supposed to be what separates people, not a means of understanding and empathy, but rather an obstacle to the desire to merge. In Guadagnino’s film “Bones and All” the cannibalistic devouring becomes the epitome of ultimate closeness; in his “Suspiria” remake the characters violently dissolve into dances that dismantle their bodies. “Bones and All” ends with an image of loneliness, as does “Queer.” And so at the end of this very beautiful and very sad drug, sex and art spectacle there is once again the longing for something that, perhaps, cannot exist.

»Queer«: Italy/USA 2024. Director: Luca Guadagnino. Screenplay: Justin Kuritzkes. With Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville. 137 minutes, start: January 2nd