By Miruna Tiberiu
Luca Guadagnino is on a roll, with no intent of stopping. After breaking the internet with now-cult-classic Call Me by Your Name (2017), a camp-yet-freaky remake of Suspiria (2018), and his latest rat-boy sensations Bones and All (2022) and Challengers (2024), the filmmaker has garnered a reputation for the erotic, unsettling, aesthetically-gritty and – the elephant in the room – queer. It comes to no surprise, then, that film lovers and social media fiends alike all-but lost their minds when it was announced that our beloved Guadagnino was directing a film very clearly and succinctly called… Queer (2024).
Queer is, like Guadagnino’s previous success Call Me by Your Name, a book adaptation. Based on William S. Burroughs’s novella of the same name, it follows the gritty, extravagant flaneur William Lee as he ambles through bars and queer expat circles in 1950s Mexico City. Swirling his bourbon and clutching his baggy of unidentifiable white powder, Lee moves from bar to hotel room, endlessly chasing his youth through steamy yet meaningless hookups. When he meets Gene, a much younger and equally lost (seemingly) straight man, Lee’s aimlessness becomes directed into one, pointed, dangerous stream.
Allow me to get a little personal here. High hopes aside, by the time I sat down to watch Queer, I was somewhat ready to dislike it. Did the world need another film about the grittiness of queer artist life? Another high budget erotic period piece, or worse, another literary adaptation from times gone by to soften the blow of our increasing identity crisis in the face of the stagnation of cultural movements today?
Second to my fear of the words “adaptation” and “period piece” was my rush to protect Burroughs’s foundational text. Adapting his Beatnik novella would under most circumstances be near impossible. For his deliberately hazy prose, following the lineage of an entire generation of artists, poets, novelists and musicians who shouted for the power of the wandering mind, who cut up the conventions of literature into tiny, surreal, morsels, to be forced into the linearity of the moving image seemed to be signing Guadagnino up for disaster.
Yet the penny inevitably dropped. Queer is not a film of a time; it is all time, and no time, at once. From the moment Sinéad O’Connor blows her breathy whispers onto the amalgam of objects piling on top of one another in the film’s opening montage, Queer ceases to be either adaptation or period piece.
Though script, set, costumes, and occasionally music, reflect the narrative’s setting – 1950s New Mexico – the film, as it ambles on, becomes a constellation of other times and places. O’Connor’s voice whips us to the mid-1990s, New Order’s Leave Me Alone, playing as Lee haunts deserted streets in the early hours of the morning, reminds us of the brief hey-day of queer urban circles on the cusp of the AIDS Epidemic. Prince’s iconic Musicology pushes us forward to the aftermath of the Epidemic’s storm. A tonal nod to Fassbinder’s canon queer film Querelle (1982) is shattered by Daniel Craig’s unmissable Bond complexion. As a drama of accumulations, Guadagnino’s Queer adapts Burroughs’s novella, more than plot and more than even aesthetic, through this precise timelessness.
One need look no further than the unconventional trajectory of Burroughs’s original. Written in the 1950s as a pseudo-sequel of his classic novel Junkie, then left to gather dust as a manuscript until it was finally, somewhat unwillingly, published in 1985, Burrough’s Queer accumulates queer histories with every generation it touches.
It captures, then, not only the vibrant worlds the Beat Generation forged as they shouted for peace, liberation, and out-and-proud queer sexuality decades before laws would match their demands. As we imagine it read in the 1980s, at the height of a collective tragedy which left its imprint on an entire generation of queer people, the intoxicating music, nighttime haunting, and sex scenes as tender as they are erotic become imbued with an anticipatory aura of danger.
The film has close to no narrative through-line, and this is its greatest strength. Guadagnino draws the stubbornness of his subject matter steadily out, turning his head away from any form of linearity, the way a child would refuse the last spoonful of a mediocre meal. Long before the point-of-view shots marking the various drug-taking and mind-altering Lee searches throughout the film, we feel constantly unsettled watching Queer, waiting for some revelation that “it was all a dream”.
Touching and gazing acquire spectral qualities. It is as soon as we see the double-exposure of Lee’s hand fold into vision, his translucent fingers gently caressing Gene’s face as his solid, fleshy arm stays put on the restaurant table, that we know we are dealing with a ghost story. ‘I’m not queer, I’m disembodied’, Lee reminds us time and time again. From our present-tense seats, the squeaky-clean artificiality of the film’s sets, built old-school from scratch on the soundstages of Rome’s Cinecittà studio, render Guadagnino’s film part museum, haunted house, and Utopia.
The film’s crisis of queerness does not end with its setting’s still-hostile, homophobic period. The crisis lies in its monosyllabic title, whose meaning we are urged to rethink through the present in light of accumulations of the past. “Queer” marginalises; it forges community. It is dangerous, disgusting, sexy, lonely, heart-warming, addicting. Lee’s pursuits for drugs, for sex, for community and communication ‘without speaking’ are all inserted into a larger-than-life queer lineage within the film’s collapse of Time.
If, by sheer coincidence, the film’s release in theatres around the world is timed to the beginning of the Second Trump Era this January, perhaps we should cease to push queer stories of euphemism, loneliness, and danger to the safe realm of the past, to shut the door on History. For skeletons fall out of closets, and ghosts haunt. And the 1950s sure as hell looks like this morning.
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