There were high hopes for Queer, Luca Guadagnino’s much-discussed William S. Burroughs adaptation, which is competing for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Sadly, the sun-soaked, dust-coated drama—a meandering and often mournful tour of 1950s Mexico City, and then South America, through a haze of tequila, heroin and, later, ayahuasca—eventually becomes a slog, though it has two redeeming factors: Daniel Craig, who stars as the film’s loquacious, scenery-chewing anti-hero, and Outer Banks’s Drew Starkey as the quiet, inscrutable object of his affection.
The opening credits set the scene well enough—a series of tableaux show us a faded mattress in a Mexico City apartment, and on it a collection of objects: books, ashtrays, typewriters, and pistols, with centipedes wriggling between them. The sequence, like the film we’re about to see, is stylish—but it also epitomizes Queer’s tendency to prioritize arresting images over actual substance, something which, by the end, becomes grating.
The mattress belongs to William Lee, a hard-drinking American expat who spends his days and nights cruising the city’s bars in search of the next hot, young arrival. As embodied by Craig in pale suits and matching trilbies, he’s somewhere between an insatiable, off-duty Bond and a foppish Benoit Blanc from the Knives Out franchise—though far less romantically successful than both, given most of the city’s boys seem to have learned to avoid him. But then, as he wanders the streets and witnesses a cockfight, he locks eyes with a dashing newcomer who smiles at him: Starkey’s Eugene Allerton. It’s like a bolt of lightning—and he’s hooked.
