‘Queer’ Charts A Man’s Eternal Quest for Human Connection

In the second act of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer (2024) – the beautiful, maddening film adaptation of beat generation legend William S. Burroughs’s 1985 autofiction text of the same name – two men, Eugene (teen soap heartthrob Drew Starkey) and Lee (Daniel Craig), sit together in a dark movie theatre to watch Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950). As Orphée’s titular character slips between real life and the underworld in search of his lover, a spectral hand emerges from Lee to caress an unsuspecting Eugene on the cheek – a symbol of his longing that disappears back into the ether just as quickly as it materialized.

It is this unrequited desire that haunts Lee, a wealthy American ex-pat living in Mexico City in the 1950s where he is free to recreationally use drugs, drink and fuck, outside of the legal or societal restraints of the United States. He is clearly miserable – an outsider crippled by self-loathing and a near-pathological need for acceptance, which he nonetheless shuns at every turn, particularly from other gay men in the city whose more overtly effeminate behaviour makes them, in his assessment, ‘subhuman things’.

Without any sense of belonging outside of his drinking buddy Joe (played by an unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman), Lee stays inebriated and bitter, biding his time by spouting conspiracy theories and pursuing straight young men with a ferocity that is equal parts predatory and pitiful. Eugene, a young ex-Marine that Lee first encounters in the scrum of a cockfight, is the subject of Lee’s current obsession and affection. Played with pristine coolness by Starkey, he is a blank slate onto which Lee can project his longing for human connection.

Whereas Lee will make grand, loud public gestures, Eugene hardly raises his voice above a self-assured whisper, preferring to observe his new environment and Lee’s unravelling with a steely gaze. He approaches Lee with a mild disinterest that, at times, borders upon annoyance: even when they have sex for the first time, Eugene shows little more than tempered satisfaction compared to Lee’s simpering ecstasy. Lee’s all-consuming desire for everything that Eugene symbolizes –community, love, acceptance – quickly turns self-destructive, culminating in an ill-fated journey to the wilds of Ecuador in search of yage, an ayahuasca-like substance that Lee alleges the CIA is using for its ability to spur telepathy in humans.

Queer’s hallucinatory final act is potent yet deeply frustrating. Gorgeously lensed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s frequent collaborator and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Lee’s isolation is momentarily erased in an intricately choreographed sequence where his and Eugene's bodies merge into an undefinable, fleshy being during their trip – a surreal moment symbolizing the true emotional connection Lee has been searching for all these years. It is a beautiful, haunting sequence that is undercut moments earlier by a cheap and far too on-the-nose jump scare: Allerton and Lee hallucinate that they have vomited up their own hearts in anticipation of their emotional catharsis.

The epilogue that follows Lee’s revelation deviates from Burroughs’s original text, slipping deeper into the writer’s biography and troubled subconscious through a series of surreal vignettes. The author’s time in Mexico City in the early 1950s was defined by an unspeakable act of violence: the murder of his wife Joan Vollmer, who Burroughs shot in the head during a drinking game he described as their ‘William Tell act’. Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes collapse Burroughs’s and Queer’s narratives into one, with Eugene serving as Joan’s double in a scene that is gorgeously rendered and emotionally devastating. Yet, this collapsing is far too contained for a life as complicated and contradictory as Burroughs’s, absolving him of guilt by assuming that there was a guilty conscience there in the first place. By the time the epilogue dissolves into an elderly Lee lying down on a cheap motel bed to die, there is a sense of peace that feels unearned, and at odds with the film on the whole.

In one of Queer’s quietest moments, Lee explains himself to Eugene. ‘I’m not queer,’ he says, ‘I’m disembodied.’ For a project so intent on showcasing the bodily and carnal – once-crisp 1950s linens sourced by Loewe mastermind Jonathan Anderson wilting in the South American heat, tequila flowing, spit and cum dripping down a lover’s chin – Queer’s most successful scenes lie in this restless, terrifying sense of out-of-body-ness. Lee is not seeking love but a reason to return to himself, a journey that takes him through bars, desolate alleys, the wilds of Ecuador and back again. Perhaps this is the best prism through which to view Queer: a single man’s life-long quest for human connection that results in an alienation so extreme as to feel a total disconnect with the world and himself. Lee is Orpheus, a man willing to travel through hell to find love but doomed to die without it.

Luca Guadagnino's Queer is in US cinemas from 27 November and UK cinemas from 13 December 

_{Main image: Luca Guadagnino, Queer, 2024, film still. Courtesy: A24; photograph: Yannis Drakoulidis}