Perhaps the most striking aspect of William S. Burroughs’ controversial novella–albeit tame in comparison to his other works–is William Lee’s loneliness. Whether he’s trying to maintain a conversation with the regulars at his local bar or attempting to sleep with another uninterested man, Lee, the Burroughs stand-in, is repeatedly treated with harsh ostracism from his homophobic audience. In Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Queer, the director’s second output of 2024 after his sexually charged sports drama Challengers, he encapsulates this early on in the film as Lee (played by Daniel Craig) is so often alone within the frame, despite being surrounded by others. The camera will briefly isolate him during failed flirtation efforts, while drinking by himself at the busy Ship Ahoy, or in the aftermath of a successful sexual encounter. This eventually escalates to more explicit signifiers, as his translucent hand will wantingly reach across to caress his unrequited love interest Allerton (Drew Starkey) only to pass through his indifferent body. It is immediately clear that this film will take an antithetical approach to human relationships as opposed to the deadly love triangle between Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, coated in a layer of delusive opulence that Guadagnino and his crew blessed our screens with early in the year.
The film’s components, from Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s stellar cinematography to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ haunting soundtrack, work together wonderfully: opening with Sinéad O’Connor’s chilling cover of All Apologies over shots of Lee’s unkempt personal quarters with manuscripts, weapons, and drug-taking apparatus littered everywhere is a brilliantly stark contrast to the more polished introduction of Call Me By Your Name. For the first hour or so, Guadagnino offers an extremely fascinating interpretation of Burroughs’ deeply personal tale, until he begins to diverge from his source material. To stretch a book slightly shy of 100-pages into a two and a quarter hour film, Guadagnino decides to bloat the story with occurrences from the author’s life and a myriad of opiate and yagé induced hallucinations.
These additions are not entirely superfluous. The writer’s drug addiction is well documented and his accidental killing of his wife Joan Vollmer during a drunken game of William Tell has inspired a multitude of his writings. But the beauty of Burroughs’ novella lies within his unbound yet direct prose and the story’s sparsity: the book does not contain the surreal narratives of Naked Lunch (which received its own David Cronenberg adaptation) or the mass drug usage and crassness of Junky. Queer is an implicitly vulnerable work of literature from a notoriously troubled author, and it is a much more stripped back piece compared to some of Burroughs’ other novels. The introduction of tepid dreamlike drug trances do very little to enrichen Lee’s tale of yearning. At their best, these sequences are somewhat visually interesting: the closing shots of the film with Daniel Craig as an elderly Lee dressed in typical Burroughs attire are quite beautiful, and one of the few excessive touches that actually works. But at their worst, which is more often than not, these clunky Lynchian replicas fail at their attempts to reach whatever levels of profundity that they may hope to. Guadagnino seems determined in obscuring this accessible work from an author who already has his fair share of challenging books, irregardless of the effectiveness of its simplicity and the futility of what the director has to offer.
Infidelity in adaptation is almost always a given when transferring mediums, and it is hardly a sin worth condemning an entire film for. But when the alterations do nothing but stunt the emotional pay-offs of the text by diluting it, they become difficult to ignore. There is a lot to love about this adaptation, from the central cast’s persistently great performances to the immersive period piece settings, which only makes the decline in the film’s latter half all the more frustrating. Guadagnino has tampered with his base texts in some of his other films to more positive results–both Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All received the same treatment, along with his complete reimagining of Suspiria–and from watching his work, it is clear that he is an indulgent director. (The reworking of a film by Giallo horror maestro Dario Argento, which is widely considered to be a longstanding pillar of the horror Pantheon, is already a clear indication of this). Yet again, this is not an issue worthy of dismissing an artists’ entire oeuvre. Challengers and Suspiria benefit from Guadagnino’s dissolute extravagance, from the former boasting some technically impressive turbo-paced tennis match sequences and the latter ending with a crimson-gushing blood bath. Some of these elements actually work quite well in Queer, as the more contemporary soundtrack consisting of Nirvana, Prince and New Order songs bring a sense of alienation to Lee’s misery. Understandably, many viewers may find this choice jarring as the music may shatter the facade of its setting in 1950s Mexico and South America. It is rather unfortunate that this also leads him to include prolonged depictions of human melding to explicitly emphasise Lee and Allerton’s feelings and their devastating conclusion which is done so effortlessly and subtly by Burroughs.
Perhaps Guadagnino will have more luck adapting Bret Easton Ellis’ deadpan descriptions of luxury fashion and grotesque murder in his alleged upcoming American Psycho film, a story more suited to the abundance of excess in a Wall Street yuppie serial killer’s life of profligacy. That is of course if the film ever makes it out of pre-production purgatory.
