The term “unadaptable” gets thrown around whenever a piece of literary fiction is primed for film/television and has thus, however inaptly, been applied to William S. Burroughs’ Queer. Written, as one critic commented before Luca Guadagnino’s latest played this year’s New York Film Festival, at a “fifth-grade level with some dirty bits thrown in,” Queer is actually highly adaptable, providing the rough foundation of a gonzoist odyssey into the Amazon for ayahuasca without the densely rich language that makes visually translating Nabakov or Woolf nearly impossible. The two and a half hours Guadagnino spins out of Burroughs’ slender second book (written in the ‘50s but published three decades later) are in fact way more metaphysical than anything on the page. Offsetting what the director contributes to the source material stylistically, however, is the chastened version of its protagonist he creates with Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. In what can only be understood as an effort to ease strain on the empathy of modern viewers, the hyperverbose neurotic penned by Burroughs has been scrubbed clean of his fascism and pedophilia—though “clean” is unlikely to be a word crossing anyone’s mind when Daniel Craig first appears on screen as William Lee, a junkie expat searching for intimacy in 1940s Mexico City.
What Lee’s really after, though, is a hallucinogenic also being pursued by world governments for mind-control experiments and which is said to carry telepathic powers. “I’m not queer; I’m disembodied,” he tells us, believing (despite warning from locals that yage is a mirror rather than a portal) that bypassing language, and therefore the word he only ever mutters in self-disgust, will finally cure a lifetime of loneliness and fuse him to “everything that is alive”—not least of all the young man, Gene Allerton (Drew Starkey), with whom he falls helplessly in love. Allerton isn’t a full-rounded character but an elusive object of desire, and Lee—played with clammy, livewire energy from Craig—pleads so unctuously for his affection he looks as if any second he might dissolve into the amorphic southwest setting brought to life by Guadagnino and co. on a Cinecittà soundstage.
Fully embracing its unreality, Queer has a Fincher film’s digital-era precision without the same abashment toward the uncanniness of blue-screen cinematography. A VFX shot of a highway crawling with globs of jelly meant to resemble cars dispels any lingering notions of naturalism just in time for a third act that features Lesley Manville as a swamp witch and a psychedelic journey deep into the well of insecurity that produced Burroughs’ writing. Anachronistic use of Nirvana and New Order reinforces the sensation of being on an altered plane of reality, where time and matter are as porous as the aging, dopesick corporeal form Lee yearns to escape.
Whereas the book’s dive bars and nightclubs paled once Burroughs’ larger-than-life alter ego entered them, Guadagnino inverts the dichotomy. The creative choice (and we can assume, given visualisations of Lee feeling as though he’s literally fading, that it is a choice) may be conceptually fitting but is nevertheless narratively frustrating, leaving Craig without much of a role. Starkey also isn’t given a lot to work with but is at least appropriately vague, as Allerton is mainly a sounding board for Lee’s cruising anecdotes and long-winded exhortations on slave-era economic theory. Excising these monologues, Queer’s big-screen adaptation is simply a plaintive drama that falls short of Burroughs’ transfixing character study (albeit with a galaxy-brained streak that enhances its colourless prose).
A movie so highly expressionistic being fashioned out of an indecorous semi-autobiographical novella is itself practically an act of telepathic transference—between a writer who sought disembodiment and a filmmaker who earlier this year jet-thrusted cinemagoers up and down a tennis court. Guadagnino has always experimented with ways of maximally engaging and sublimating the senses; spiritually convening with Burroughs, he crafts a kind of autofiction himself, exploring his thematic interests with greater clarity than ever before. The closing title card may read, “William S. Burroughs’ Queer,” but the madcap 130 minutes preceding it unquestionably belong to their director.
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville
Writer: Justin Kuritzkes, (based on Queer by William S. Burroughs)
