In Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino filmed queer desire in shimmering bands of golden sunlight. He filled each pastoral frame with bare male torsos passionately colliding in the Italian countryside and in pools of blue water. Each long summer day provided the director with an opportunity to cast same-sex shame away and into the shadows. The film stands as a rebuke to a particular kind of American puritanism, one that reduces homosexuality to something deviant and therefore inferior to the dominant heteronormative paradigm.
Daylight, when it does appear in Guadagnino’s latest film, Queer, is weak and transient. The consequential action in this film takes place at night, when dreams and nightmares take shape in the mind. Based on a novella by William S. Burroughs (1914–1997), Lee (Daniel Craig), the protagonist, prowls the bars and streets of Mexico City looking for hookups and, at the same time, a way to ease his existential ennui. In the novella, Burroughs writes, “What Lee looked for in any relationship was the feel of contact.” He’s out cruising for a feeling and the physical contact.
But Lee complicates his nocturnal outings. He wanders from place to place in a hazy shadowland of his own making. When he’s not drunk, he’s getting high; or, he’s shaking off withdrawal symptoms from alcohol and drugs. Craig fuels the character with a mournful aura of longing and restlessness. We watch as the character’s sense of self melts away and out of the actor’s astonishing blue eyes. If his nervous system wasn’t always chemically altered, those eyes would be dripping saintly tears. Lee’s ongoing pursuit of connection is elusive, self-destructive and increasingly illusory.
That disconnect nominally changes when he catches a glimpse of Gene (Drew Starkey), a much younger, American beauty with no origin story of his own. During that initial sighting—a coup de foudre for Lee—Guadagnino slows the camera down so the audience can admire him. Whether clothed or unclothed, he’s a thirst trap. His appearance is intended to mesmerize Lee and the gay male gaze. But the director and the screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, never flesh out the details of Gene’s character.
The filmmakers have modeled him, instead, after the women in Luis Buñuel’s 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire. In Buñuel’s film, two actresses play the same woman. Both Conchitas succeed at frustrating the hero’s attempts to sleep with them while they continue to fitfully engage with his emotions. Whereas in Queer, sex isn’t the only thing Lee wants from Gene. After they sleep together, the two men begin a relationship, of sorts. Lee hesitantly circles around Gene, trying to charm and amuse his new companion, receiving indifferent or noncommittal replies. Emotionally, Gene’s a closed book.
Lee pays for drinks and meals but Gene doesn’t seem to be sticking around for the money. Lee’s flat is squalid rather than luxurious. While they frequent some of the same haunts during the day, cafés and restaurants, Gene retains a distant air of autonomy. He maintains other friendships and, at times, acknowledges Lee in public with only a slight nod of his head.
The story’s tension doesn’t arise from a “Will they or won’t they?” dynamic. Nor does Gene appear to be motivated by a sadistic streak. It’s hard to tell what exactly is driving him since he usually brandishes a blank-faced expression. As a conversationalist, he’s mostly monosyllabic or mute. In Queer and That Obscure Object of Desire, the objects of desire don’t really exist. They’re ephemeral fantasies concocted by the men’s overactive imaginations.
Queer is a portrait of an artist stuck in a perpetual state of longing, and Guadagnino’s deliberate antidote to the pure romantic spectacle of Call Me by Your Name. Gene materializes onscreen as a projection or a distortion of Lee’s varied psychological states. As a person or personality without distinction, the young man is a handsome cipher who’s ultimately irrelevant to the narrative and to Lee. Despite his intellect and tremulous wit, Lee doesn’t figure out how to make contact with him. Even a psychedelic drug trip in the jungles of South America—one that manifests a moment of shared telepathy—doesn’t succeed at forming a lasting bond between them.
When Burroughs was writing in the 1950s, being queer was considered pathological; it was a punishable offense. Lee has absorbed that pathology, a sickness invented by the conventional society he was born into. In a sustained closeup on Craig’s face, the director anachronistically chooses to play the New Order song “Leave Me Alone.” Lee’s sorrow in the scene marks him as an outsider and an outcast who’s eternally estranged from himself. He subsequently dreams of an infinity symbol formed by a snake that’s eating its own tail.
Now playing in select theaters.
