‘Queer’: Guadagnino and unrequited love

Address: Luca Guadagnino

Artists: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman and Omar Apollo

Premiere: January 1, 2025

★★★★

Luca Guadagnino is runningqueerIt’s a risk, even if he doesn’t experience it that way: adapting a writer like William S. Burroughs without any intention of sacrificing his own mannerisms, aesthetic whims, and appeal to experimentation in order to remain faithful to him. Does this mean you’re moving away from the novel ‘Queer’ that you adapted? Like hell. There is no doubt that the director of ‘Call Me by Your Name’ (2017) knows, understands and loves Burroughs’ literature. But instead of devoting himself strictly to the service of the text, Turn the author’s cruel, dirty and harsh universe into visualsapply own opinion.

The result is a strange intersection of writers that is not always a match but is fascinating. Divided into three parts and an epilogue‘Queer’ begins in Mexico in 1951 and follows in the footsteps of American writer William Lee (Daniel Craig). The appearance of a young ex-soldier (Drew Starkey) will mean a painful journey of self-discovery for him. This trip consists of many trips that Guadagnino filmed in different ways. ‘Queer’ are successive (sometimes overlapping) trips to the same places: desire, identity and impossible love. There are physical, mental, dreamlike, alcoholic and hallucinogenic ones. And Guadagnino, even the calmest one, experiments with form (what a strange planning method, what unconventional editing decisions). The experimentation is more striking in the third part and the prologue, but the not always satisfactory formal play dominates the whole and gives rise to a film in search of truth. I play with images and sounds ways to represent the complexity of desire.