Queer

Releasing two films in one year is a pretty impressive feat for any Director.

Bizarrely, for the second time this year, a celebrated auteur has followed arguably a breakout work hastily with a fearsomely well made, but largely impenetrable, companion piece that will capture audiences keen to see what they did next but also may slightly alienate them.

First, it was Yorgos Lanthimos following the Oscar-winning Poor Things with the beautiful but bonkers Kinds Of Kindness and now Luca Guadagnino follows the year-end-list-botherer Challengers with the beautiful but bonkers Queer.

Based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, Queer is a bohemian, drug quest film in the lineage of the beat writers and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas etc..

It contains many of the themes that have marked Guadagnino as a hugely exciting Director: lust, relationship dynamics etc but goes down a rabbit hole of surrealism that will be largely off putting to many as the film moves beyond ‘arthouse’ cinema to mind-bending difficulty.

Set in Mexico in the 1950s, Daniel Craig is immense as the Burroughs surrogate William Lee, equally obsessed with the unknowable ‘new man in town’ Eugene and a trip to seek out Ayahuasca, something he hopes will unlock psychic powers.

Clearly a metaphor for the unknowable parts of the self and the journey through the mind of addiction, shame, self-love, self-respect and truly knowing yourself and others but, despite this, the film really does spend half its time exploring the burgeoning friendship and relationship between these men in Mexico City before then taking them into the Ecuadorian jungle for an almost Apocalypse Now-esque denouement that flips the tone on its head.

You can feel those aforementioned themes and what Guadagnino is going for but unfortunately, for many, this film’s sequences, dialogue and slightly ponderous nature will be too hard to follow.

Make no mistake, Guadagnino absolutely nails the sense of place and that sweaty, sticky, hungover feel of these novels and stories. Visually, the film is astounding and there are some breath taking moments.

However, we’ve seen a film this year within the arthouse style that just nails a similar tale in a far more accessible way and All Of Us Strangers stands above this film as the more rewarding and 'easier to recommend' watch.

Queer, like Kinds Of Kindness, is for the extreme arthouse connoisseur and I’m sure will find a suitably cult following in those circles. It’s a great way of presenting, like Fear And Loathing… and On The Road before it, the beatnik writers onscreen but won’t be for many outside of lovers of that style.

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