Queer

Friday March 14 @ 7 pm

2 hr 17 min
Bio / Drama – Rated 18A – Released 2024

The seductive, damaged charm of Daniel Craig kills off his Bond to inhabit a dissolute American expat in Luca Guadagnino’s handsome adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella Queer. Craig is touchingly vulnerable as the frustrated and exhausted barfly who knows that he isn’t the man he once was, but who still has glints of his old panache. Played with sensitivity and predatory heat by Daniel Craig, Lee has a feverish mind, eyes like searchlights and a mouth that’s quick to sneer. There are moments when he seems possessed, though it’s not often clear what’s taken hold of his soul. Stripping away all the confidence that armoured James Bond and Benoit Blanc, Craig reminds us of what an exceptional actor he is. His portrayal just won him a Golden Globe nomination as best actor in a drama. Is Oscar next? Wait and see.

Burroughs remains best known as one of the coolest cats in the Beats; it was Jack Kerouac who suggested the title for Queer. Burroughs came from money, had a difficult past, sartorial flair, a hypnotically droning voice and a sinister aura. “He’s up there with the pope,” Patti Smith said. “Without Burroughs,” Lou Reed said, “modern lit would be a drama without a page, a sonnet without a song and a bone without gristle.” Burroughs, who died in 1997, and Kurt Cobain collaborated on a project, and Nirvana is featured on the soundtrack, suggesting Burroughs’s reach. He was a classic American figure: the nonconformist as cult.

Brazenly mixing period accurate sets and costumes, old-school production techniques (including rear projections and miniature buildings and landscapes) and deliberately anachronistic music choices (including Nirvana needle-drops), Queer often suggests a 1980s art house import by an outlaw filmmaker that was just recently unearthed: the kind of film that would slowly build an audience at midnight showings. It also serves up a smorgasbord of explicit homoerotic imagery, surrealism and ambiguity at a time when Western culture seems to be stampeding towards 1950s prurience, fascist-scented literal-mindedness, and corporate self-censorship, Queer is a film out of its time in just about every way. That’s what’s invigorating about it.

Queer offers something raw and relatable through its in-deep portrait of longing, complicated by sex and drugs. Virtuoso director Luca Guadagnino found the heat and heart in Call Me By Your Name. And now, working with his simpatico Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, he does it again. And Craig doesn’t just know how Lee moves, speaks and listens, he knows how he breathes. He casts a spell you won’t want to break. The same goes for this fascinating movie.