NYFF 2024 Review: “Queer” – A Surreal Spectacle!

Luca Guadagnino is one of the few filmmakers who brings an entirely new freshness and atmosphere to all of his movies while maintaining his brilliant style. Whether making original or adapted films from novels or past screenplays, Guadagnino’s presence in the world of cinema has reached out to general audiences with the success of films like Call Me By Your Name and Challengers and film lovers alike with Bones and All and his 2018 version of Suspiria. His Italian heritage and cinematic style fused with screenwriters and actors prominent in American cinema has made him one of the most interesting modern filmmakers.

Queer, a written by William S. Burroughs was a novel that Guadagnino bonded with as a teenager and hoped to adapt throughout his career. Rejoining with his screenwriter from Challengers, Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino has developed a heart-breaking and surreal adaptation of Burroughs, creating a conclusion to his novel that further examines Burroughs as a writer in the eyes of Guadagnino’s new brilliant work.

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Lee (Daniel Craig) lives in Mexico City as an expatriate who spends his days in a local bar, Ships Ahoy, drinking and sweating in the summer heat. Spending his nights with lovers to mask his internal loneliness, Lee is unable to fully live a life outside his drug and alcohol addiction. One night when he sees an attractive young man named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) Lee’s infatuation grows into an intense relationship.

On the surface, Queer is easy to want to compare to Call Me By Your Name but it is far removed from a tale of passion and longing about two people who can’t be together. Instead Guadagnino’s story of queer lovers handles the concept of addiction as it affects romantic relationships, with Lee’s inability to bask in a love fully while under the influence of a stronger addictive force.

The film takes on a man who himself is the reason for his own loneliness and unattainable love with Eugene. The examination of Lee in the film dives deep into constant dependency on others because of his substance abuse and how his longing for someone to love is stronger than Eugene’s attachment to Lee. Where Lee only means something to Eugene, Eugene means everything to Lee, as the film focuses on the impossibility of love when one party in a relationship is unfulfilled in their own identity.

Queer uses Italian style cinematography to paint Mexico City in a gorgeous yet vastly isolating light in Lee’s point of view. The constant use of the same bar and city streets creates a comfortability and compact feeling for the audience to withhold where the nighttime shots of the area paint it very openly, mirroring Lee’s vast emptiness within. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross compose a smooth score that plays over Lee and Eugene’s sweeter moments together with a blast of semi-modern music like Nirvana playing over scenes where Lee walks the streets alone. It creates this very cool atmosphere that has the audience swaying their heads to the beat and feeling powerful in moments where Lee exhibits the opposite sensation.

Cinematically, the film in the beginning feels in the realm of Luca Guadagnino’s other works. However, he then enters into Burroughs-esque storytelling that feels fantastical and surreal as it pertains to Lee’s drug addiction and his longing to be at one with Eugene, telepathically in sync. This is where Queer features some of its more experimental and hallucinogenic sequences that take the film from “love story” to spiritual awakening with a conclusion that leaves the audience breathing a sigh of fresh air but still feeling stuck in the world of an unfulfilled man passing through life.

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Queer is one of Luca Guadagnino’s boldest films to date combining his own personality and connection to the novel with an adherence to Burrough’s life, style, and works in the process. Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey are brilliantly cast with Craig giving one of his best career performances. There is little territory that Guadagnino is unable to touch, always bringing layered characters to screen that touch audiences through their respective journeys and connection to each other. Queer may not resonate with all viewers but it is undeniable the craftsmanship put into every aspect of the film that makes it visually mesmerizing.

‘Queer [2024]’ Rating – 4/5

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