“You’re Not a Faggot!” Sex, Drugs, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Queer Of Luca Guadagnino It is a surprising film and one of sincere self-deprecating intimacy. Take the novel by William Burroughs of the early 50s and instead of going through the pulping of Cronenberg make him a Guadagnino: that is, eroticism, visionariness and even a hint of romanticism. William Lee (a Daniel Craig simply awesome) is a middle-aged American with a gun in his belt, expatriate in Mexico City.
His is a constant coming and going between gay and less gay clubs, between explicit attempts to pick up men, rivers of tequila, tons of opium and tons of cigarettes. The beautiful unknown young Eugene (Drew Starkey), broad shoulders and a soft stride, is a student who between one counter and another appears to William as a model of angelic and supernatural vision. The attempt to hook the boy happens quite easily, but the impetuous and enjoyable consumption of the flesh is something completely different from a deeper feeling that William seems to feel. To keep him close to him, the mature American suggests the boy take a trip to South America in search of the hallucinogen yage (theayahuasca) as William spasmodically sings the praises of his supposed development of telepathic powers.
The journey to Ecuador and then the jungle is long and perilous, and will end in front of a bizarre doctor/witch who will initiate them into the cult of the prodigious and toxic root. After a substantial first part compressed inside smoky and sweaty bars, shabby bedrooms, in the company of a chorus of “queers”, where sex is evoked and done with grace as if it were raining, Guadagnino and the screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes take Burroughs’ cue for a second and third part (and even more so in the epilogue) that fluctuates between picaresque, painful, fantastical hallucinatory tones. In short, precisely in its impossible predictability, in these lively space-time gaps forward, Queer proves to be one of those creatively free and brazenly open works. After all, Guadagnino faces it as if in a mirror, beyond the anagraphical turns of Call me by your namethe theme of homosexuality as a social condition and of the soul. “Is he one of us?” William’s acquaintances often ask in bars, referring to Eugene’s strange behavior, who also seems to frequent women.
“The Lees have always been perverts,” William emphasizes about Eugene. As if the protagonist were condemned to a self and repetitive isolation of his own sexual orientation and his own unspeakable impulses. Eugene is the breaking point of this almost grotesque and lonely unhappiness of the protagonistthat figure that allows William to think about the concept of “disembody”, of disembodying, of separating something from its physical and material form. And it will be precisely the assumption of the yage that will illuminate with a handful of successful hallucinatory sequences the relationship between the two men and the feverish restlessness of the protagonist. It is clear that the retaliation of the second part (which however has an anal sex scene) cannot exist without an explicit and warm corporeal sensuality that Craig and Starkey develop in the first part.
The hypothetical dimension of the scandal passes from Craig biting Starkey’s erect member but covered by his underwear, then from the oral sex he performs on him, and finally from the subsequent exchange of sperm from mouth to mouth between the two. Guadagnino once again demonstrates an incredible versatility of expressive registers, as if he were more at ease with stories detached from the present, but above all in managing to camouflage his references to the cinephile pantheon with a class and a superfine power. That epilogue that recalls Kubrick’s masterpiece and that ending of colored flashes in the dark not only really seem like the obvious closure of Queer, but they also imprint with poetic ease a hint of emotion. Filmed between Cinecittà and Ecuador. Produced mostly by the Italian capital of Fremantle.
