'Queer' Movie Review: Daniel Craig Is Hypnotic In Luca Guadagnino’s Steam Of Decay

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Writer: Justin Kuritzkes

Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, Lesley Manville

Language: English

“Steam of Decay" — this phrase from William Burroughs’s novel Queer trickles like a drip feed from Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation, which also borrows from Burrough’s later works. The smoke, heat, sweat, grime, the sediments of heroin, milky pond of cum, the stale, ashen breath from a packet of smoked cigarettes, the ache of addiction, the cheap brandy-induced vomit, the dysentery of withdrawal in 1950s Mexico and, later, the jungles of South America, give the effect of post coital remains. You want to shower, but you also want to stew in it, for just a bit more, five more minutes, and five more, more. (The film, originally 200 minutes, was brutally cut to 135 minutes.) 

An auto-fictional hallucination, the film follows the descent of the old and worn-out William Lee (Daniel Craig) into desire, though descent is an evident, almost implied phrase. Where there is desire, there has to be descent. The question, then, is how the fall is padded, do you break your bones or just your heart? 

Lee finds his muse in Eugene Allerton, also an American expatriate, much younger, almost as though a classical sculpture has descended from marble to flesh, from its serene pedestal — his presence is perfumed; you never know what goes on behind his eyes. For all you know, it is empty. 

To see Starkey’s opaque presence against Craig’s expressionistic embodiment of Lee’s junk sickness, wearing his libido on his sleeve, is to see an inevitable parting; there is no way they become one. 

Lee pays for a trip they take to South America to scour and simmer in ayahuasca — a psychoactive substance that Lee hopes will help him communicate telepathically, with Eugene. The only condition is that Eugene has to “be nice to him” twice a week.

It is a futile pursuit, but Guadagnino is interested in the textures, the push and pull, the joys of lust fulfilled and the indignity of it being thwarted. The question of whether Eugene loves Lee is not even brought up — the question is can Eugene endure Lee. Similarly, it is impossible to slot Lee's desire as love. It is a strong pull, driven by some primal throbbing, but most troubling, self-effacing isolation. Guadagnino frames desire as though it were the protagonist — the way Eugene has to reach over the arms of Lee to ash the cigarette, each ashing a promise of touch, for example.

The film, then, borrows this push and pull rhythm of the relationship — or rather, arrangement —  as it staggers, naps, and leaps forward. Time is a formality — after the first time Lee and Eugene meet, the next day, he says they have been conversing for weeks. Time stews in the South American jungles. Under the influence, the film’s image approaches the surreal, the horrific, the sublime. These images of bodies merging, turning a romantic rhetorical flourish into a literalised nightmare, pushes to the fore the lapsed romanticism that to love or to lust under the scaffolding of love, is a terrifying thing. They emerge from the experience tongue tied. They have nothing to say to one another. Their parting is just as sudden. 

We jump two years, back in Mexico, then diving sideways into what the screenplay describes as a “nowhere/everywhere city”. Then we jump decades, just to arrive at a moment to end this madness. And as we exit the film to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ ‘Vaster Than Empires’ — from a line in Burrough’s text — the weight of all these slippages and emphases crippled me. I did not want to leave the theater, yearning for the missing 65 minutes.

A still from 'Queer'.

Queer is dogged by strange choices — Nirvana playing over Lee’s estrangement feels like a counter cultural transference across decades, it almost yanks you out of the film, plonking you into a music video, and the film keeps fracturing by design; Guadagnino constantly panning away from sex to the cityscape is expected and annoying; the sense of frayed existence is so palpable with Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s image making, it did not need to be materialised through visual gimmicks. Queer is Guadagnino pursuing cinema in a frenetic haze of flinging paint at the canvas. It is never coherent — as is the text — rambling but always circling, but never stating Lee’s loneliness. 

I kept wondering if Elio from Call Me By Your Name would grow up to become Lee. It is not impossible to imagine. If CMBYN put us in the desiring body of a young Elio as he yearns for an older, more settled man, Queer puts us in the desiring body of an older Lee as he yearns for a young, more diffuse man. The central force of both characters, both films, is love that is touched but never blessed. If CMBYN expressed desire met, realised, but not enduring, Queer expresses desires barely met, barely realised, that the point of it enduring is not even imagined. Time has a way of turning one kind of story to the other. 

As the twink ages into the lonely queer man, I think of CP Cavafy, the Alexandrian poet, who in his older years goes back to the rooms where, in his youth, he had had sex. He remembers how the bed on which he made love was by the window. He remembers the way the afternoon light fell in. He also remembers the end, which never felt like it at the time. 

“At four o’clock one afternoon we parted

for just a week … But alas,

That week lasted forever.”

After desire, there is only memory. Queer is that.  

Queer screened in the World Cinema section at IFFK 2024