Queer review: Daniel Craig is 'heartbreaking' in this explicit gay romance, but the story goes off the rails

Luca Guadagnino's latest film sees the James Bond star on exceptional form as a dissolute writer into casual sex and strong liquor. He's easily the best thing about it.

When Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name came out in 2017, the director was criticised for the coyness of the two male lovers' sex scenes. Even the film's screenwriter, James Ivory, argued that Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer's naked bodies should have been on show. "To me," he said, "that's a more natural way of doing things than to hide them, or to do what Luca did, which is to pan the camera out of the window toward some trees." Evidently, Guadagnino bore those words in mind when he was making Queer, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, because when Daniel Craig goes to bed with a man, their coupling is shown from enthusiastic start to explosive finish. Anyone who enjoyed seeing Craig striding out of the ocean in his swimming trunks in Casino Royale will be in for a treat.

Well, sort of. But it's only fair to say that his character, William Lee, is a world away from the secret agent who made Craig a superstar, even if the two men share a fondness for casual sex and strong liquor. Queer is adapted from William Burroughs's novel, which was published in 1985, but was written in the 1950s as a fictionalised account of the author's own experiences. It begins in Mexico City, where the dissolute Lee wanders from bar to bar wearing a trilby hat, a linen suit and a pistol on his belt. As he knocks back tequila, he swaps gossip with his fellow American roués, including a beer-bellied writer played by Jason Schwartzman. He also eyes up any man who might be willing to join him in his hotel room. One potential candidate is Gene (Drew Starkey), a fresh-faced, glowingly handsome photographer. Lee is besotted from the moment he spots this young Adonis, and the fact that he can't tell whether Gene is gay or not only adds to the stranger's allure.

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. Stripping away all the confidence that armoured James Bond and Benoit Blanc, Craig reminds us of what an exceptional actor he is, and his heartbreaking performance is enough to sustain the sad anti-romance between two ex-pats. But the Mexico City section, labelled Chapter One, takes up only the first third of Queer. In Chapter Two, Lee and Gene go on a trip to South America, where Lee is reduced to a shivering wreck by his heroin withdrawal. Chapter Three finds the pair hacking their way through an Ecuadorian jungle in search of a plant which might just grant them telepathic powers. This quest leads them to a cackling, snake-wrangling botanist – played by Lesley Manville, of all people – whereupon Queer takes a trippy turn into a body-horror movie that recalls Guadagnino's remake of Suspiria.

Considering how unpredictable this narrative is, you couldn't say the film was boring, exactly, but you couldn't say it was gripping, either. Burroughs' novel is cherished by his fans because it seems so unusually sincere and unguarded, and Guadagnino has said that he wanted his film to be a "tender... universal story about love". And yet he and his screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, have made a series of eccentric, mildly funny vignettes which aren't really connected to each other, and which involve various self-indulgent characters we hardly know. It's difficult to care about any of it. Craig's soul-baring, skin-baring turn aside, Queer is a proudly artificial curio, from its anachronistic placement of Nirvana and Prince songs on the soundtrack to its use of studio sets that look like they've been painted by Edward Hopper. As a result, the love story is nowhere near as affecting as the one in Call Me By Your Name, not to mention those in Guadagnino's more recent films, Bones and All and Challengers. It's not as affecting as the one in Casino Royale, either. 

★★★☆☆

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