Queer at the Venice Film Festival review: this film needs to be dirtier

Queer is Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ autobiographical novel of the same name. Written between 1951 and 1953, yet not published until 1985, the novel follows its hero William Lee around Mexico and South America in the pursuit of love, drugs and epiphanies. Guadagnino remains faithful to the novel, though he changes one key element and adds a postscript.

The film is broken up into chapters. In the first, we meet Lee (Daniel Craig), an American author who has chosen to live in Mexico City to avoid a heroin case pending in the US. He goes from bar to bar and hotel room to hotel room, picking up local lads in the constant, voracious search for his next sexual fix. Lee is played athletically by Craig, who moves like a dancer and has a far more ripped body than a middle-aged man who is constantly sozzled on mezcal should have. He carries a gun, reads Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (what else?) and has created a life filled with friends in his new homeland. The only thing Lee apparently doesn’t do is write, despite the presence of typewriters in his apartment. He also doesn’t do heroin anymore, at least until he does.

The city is teeming with gay American men on the prowl. One of Lee’s closest friends is Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman), the owner of the Ship Ahoy bar, a character who provides most of the comedy in this film. Behind the banter, Guidry is an anchor and confidante to Lee. When the latter encounters Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) he is smitten, at which point he develops two left feet and the comedic clumsiness of a simpering maladroit teen. Is Allerton gay or straight? Can Lee woo him? He goes to great lengths to find out.

When Lee decides to take a trip to South America in search of ayahuasca, a drug that is purported to induce telepathy, he takes Eugene with him along with a renewed acquaintance with heroin. Eugene becomes his carer and procurer, the score becomes more sombre and discordant and even the weather becomes stormier.

When a botanist in Quito provides him with a map that will guide him and Eugene to Dr Cotter (Lesley Manville), who is researching the drug, the men embark on an absurd journey through the darkest depths of the jungle. Manville is a delight, playing Cotter as a gun-toting Annie Oakley type, yet she is perceptive and knowledgeable, stating that the drug is “a mirror and when you look in it, you might not like what you see.” Earlier in the film, Lee and Eugene go to the cinema, where they watch Jean Cocteau’s Orphée and we see the scene when Heurtebise and Orpheus go through the looking glass. Does the drug take the men to the underworld? Will one of them be left behind, as Eurydice was in the Greek myth?

Guadagnino has chosen not to film in Mexico (filming took place mainly in Rome and Sicily). The film sets are purposely fake, as if lifted from a 1950s B movie. Architectural models are used to replicate neighbourhoods and towns, while toy airplanes whisk the men from Mexico to South America. Only Ecuador was used for chapter three of the film. Why this fakery? To separate the fiction from the facts of Burroughs’ life? The reasons are unclear, but the effect is to distance the audience from the characters and their vicissitudes. The whorehouses, the filth and the cock fights that Burroughs writes about do not translate convincingly onto the screen. This film needs to be dirtier.

The highly choreographed dream sequences and drug taking also bore and drag the film into the realm of pretentiousness (although Lee’s first return to heroin is brilliant). More successful is Guadagnino’s use of dissolving and transparency: in a touching scene that shows Lee’s desire and vulnerability, when the men are watching Orphée, a phantom Lee reaches out to Eugene while the real Lee is too afraid to. At one point, later in the film, Lee fades to nothing, disintegrating in so many ways before our eyes.

Despite Craig’s superb performance and the support of his superlative co-stars, the film just doesn’t engage the audience. This might be because of Burroughs’ writing, or the problem of depicting addictions and hallucinations. There are some great moments, four excellent performances and some great lines, but together they are not enough to create a coherent or entertaining film.

Out in cinemas in 2024