The films of Luca Guadagnino tend to be so rapturously received, critical opinion will soon reach the reverent heights of Guadagnino’s own self-assessment.
In interviews, the director tends to adopt the tone of an aristocratic genius stooping to discuss his artistry with some stupid peasant. When one hapless interlocutor asks a perfectly reasonable question about why there are several Nirvana songs in Guadagnino’s new film, Queer, which is based on the 1985 book by William S. Burroughs and set in 1950s Mexico, the director responds with the grandiosity of a Sicilian duke:
I personally have been cultivating my knowledge of Burroughs and passion for him and my attraction for his imagery forever — since I was 16 — which made me meet, in the process, Nirvana. I engraved in my consciousness and unconsciousness a lot of elements that are directly or indirectly related with one another about these two great artists. So when it came to this movie, it was more instinctual, the process of having those choices, more than rational. But the unconscious never lies. These crossover references that you’re directing us towards, they’re very accurate. They’re accurate because the intuition behind it has been nurtured by a deep studying of the texts.
Read a few interviews like that and you expect to be really blown away by the film that results from such unerring “deep study” and “unconscious revelation.” But sadly, Queer is a stubbornly inert film, striving for knockout emotional truths without ever once achieving them.
Daniel Craig exhausts himself playing Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a middle-aged American expatriate in an increasingly dirty, cream-colored Brooks Brothers suit and fedora who’s hanging around Mexico City pursuing his habits — drinking, shooting heroin, writing, and trying to get laid. For some strange reason, Guadagnino and his screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (Challengers) gloss over two of the four habits….
Auteur: Eileen Jones
