Movie Review | Queer

Queer movie (Photo – A24)

“I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,” says the character William Lee in the new film Queer, written and directed by Luca Guadagnino.

Queer
Directed by Luca Guadagnino– 2024
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

Based on the eponymous novel by William Burroughs, the movie is more about Burroughs as an individual, a legend of sorts, than any particular source. “William Lee” as embodied by Daniel Craig is the best thing about the movie. The Bond action hero is in Queer an exile in middle age, at variance with the United States and his own body as well, as Craig shows by his walk and the nervous way he shrugs his shoulders. It is wordless acting at its best.

Uncomfortable in his own skin, William Lee is uncomfortable too with the north American attitude toward his “proclivities” (that is, homosexuality). The movie begins with him in Mexico, cruising the bars and encountering others who are more comfortable in a state of exodus from the USA .

William meets and falls in love with a younger man, Eugene. After some wooing, groping, and bargaining he (who, like Burroughs, is scion to a family fortune) invites Eugene to South America, all expenses paid.

Here the movie hits on more Burroughs-centric notes, his drug use, paranoia (he speaks of the US and Russia both developing means of thought control) and the film even reproduces in a dream sequence the gun accident where Burroughs killed his wife. There is a repeated insectoid-jewelry motif running throughout, an allusion to the fact that Burroughs worked as an exterminator for many years. The third part of Queer includes a hallucinatory jungle sequence and, or so I think, veiled references to Kubrick’s 2001. Someone aged like the Burroughs of Drugstore Cowboy appears at the film’s final sequence.

Is it worth seeing? Knowing a little about Burroughs helps, but you don’t need to do your homework to appreciate Craig’s performance or the art direction that captures the 50’s look as if we were staring into an old, partially faded postcard.

> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, AMC Santa Anita 16, and Laemmle Glendale.