Queer knows how to hide its secrets.
Told in three chapters and one epilogue, Queer opens with William Lee (Daniel Craig) in a Mexican village. Like his fellow expats, Lee spends most of his days drinking and cruising for sex. Later on, he reveals that he had to leave the States because of “his disease” (he’s gay, and this is the 1950s), but I also get the impression that when Lee came to Mexico, he discovered that sex and tequila were easy to come by and the American dollars went far. So Lee became a gentleman of leisure rocking rumpled off-white linen suits perpetually soaked in sweat.
Lee’s not what you would call out and proud, but he’s not exactly the self-loathing type either. He’s somewhere in between, more predator than lover, more hedonist than iconoclast. He cruises the same half-dozen bars, spends most of the day drinking with the same men — his relationship with the pleasantly plump Joe Guirdy (Jason Schwartzman) is the closest Queer gets to a romantic relationship — and not working. Judging by the typewriter and manuscript in his apartment, Lee’s a writer, mostly likely a mirror of the source material’s author, William S. Burroughs, but you never see him write. You do see him drink. A lot.
Lee’s a drunk, but he’s also a junkie. Heroin is his drug of choice, and though director Luca Guadagnino teases that bit of information in the movie’s opening credits — which employ kinetic Ralph Steadman-esque fountain ink splashes — Queer takes its time getting back to it.
And Queer is a movie in no hurry to get where it’s going. When Lee shoots up, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camera hangs over Lee slipping into a pleasant junk haze while New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” plays uninterrupted for almost four minutes.
You may find yourself repulsed by Lee — his haircut screams Neo-Nazi, and his name echoes the Confederacy — but he is charismatic, and whiling away the afternoon in these Mexican bars isn’t an unpleasant experience. But once Lee takes a young lover, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), we see how far down the opium rabbit hole he’s gone and how desperate he’s willing to be.
Adapted from Burrough’s novella of the same name, Queer plays like Luca Guadagnino’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — another movie that approached its material with a deliberate pace. In both, the narrative provides enough space for the audience to wonder where the story is heading next. It also allows an equal amount of time to reconfigure those assumptions in the following scenes.
And Queer’s final third will require an awful lot of reconfiguring. Throughout the movie, Lee speaks of a South American root he read about in a magazine — yagé — that can induce telepathy. The Russians are using it for mind control, or so he believes, as is the CIA, or so he surmises. Lee is very, very interested in yagé. He claims he wants telepathy but never says why. Maybe he wants to know what Eugene really thinks of his older, more demanding patron. Or maybe Lee is looking for the next great high. This isn’t like a high you’re used to, Doctor Cotter (Lesley Manville) assures him. It’s not, but Lee doesn’t care.
The consumption of the yagé — or ayahuasca, as it’s commonly known — unmoors Lee. Nothing that happens, nothing that he sees or hears from this moment on, will be grounded in any sort of reality. Ditto for the viewer. Guadagnino, Mukdeeprom and editor Marco Costa craft images that are distinctly unreal and uncertain. But wasn’t that always the case? Those Mexican streets Lee stumbled across from cantina to cantina never looked like real Mexican streets, did they? Were those characters sitting at that table in the corner ever there? And where did that pool table come from?
But by the time Lee finds his bedroom beyond Jupiter, you wonder if any of this ever really happened.
ON SCREEN: Queer is currently in limited release and opens wide on Dec. 13.