(courtesy IMP Awards
Finding somewhere to belong, and just as importantly, someone to belong to, is one of the great drivers of what it means to be human.
We need, crave and desperately desire connection, and when we find it, there is joy and contentment in abundance … but when we don’t?
Well, then, we are Queer‘s William Lee (Daniel Craig), a wealthy expat American who is living in Mexico, and travelling throughout South America in the 1950s, ostensibly because it provides him with a place where he can indulge his opiate addiction without official legal censure.
But in his quest for a place that will legally protect him from the effects, judicially at least, of his recreational drug habits – though Lee observes, painfully knowingly at one point that there is nothing “recreational” about taking heroin – he is uprooted to the point where his life in Mexico is a not even remotely satisfying wafting between one-night stands with attractive younger man and endless shots of tequila at the same old bars with the same old archly bitter queens (which, happily, for Queer, includes Jason Schwartzman as unapologetically dissolute and very funny gay expat, Joe Guidry).
While moving restlessly from bar to bar and scornfully pitying glances from an array of gay men hiding in plain sight, William notices the gloriously beautiful and fashionably dressed Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a navy veteran who declares he is gay but in the same way as William.
It’s not clear exactly what this means other than while he enjoys William’s company, or appears to do so at first, he is sparing in his willingness to indulge in carnal activities, and will often emotionally and physically push William away, often choosing the company of a red headed woman.
Theirs is a relationship that bounces between intimacy and almost ostracising hostility, from Eugene at least, and while William is clearly needily, desperately in love and demonstrates in ways that make you simultaneously cringe in embarrassment for him while feeling soul-crushingly sad for how raw, hurt and vulnerable he is.
When Queer stays in this reasonably regular narrative territory, it is thing of poetically arresting beauty, a film that slowly and poignantly takes us into William’s deeply flawed and emotionally scarred world which is crying out for care and connection but which often looks barren of both.
Where the film by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) starts to unravel and come unhinged, losing focus and narrative momentum, is when William, still seeking some sense of connection with others than transcends his pain and emotional isolation, heads to South American, specifically Ecuador, in search of yagé, a hallucinogenic plant that he believes with almost evangelical fervour with give the gift of telepathy and a link to others that he currently singularly lacks.
Once he sets off on this journey, things get seriously weird, and while that can be liberatingly revelatory in a film where it’s use judiciously and to emotionally illuminating effect, in Queer it begins to feel messy and pointless and just plain strange to no real point.
About the only thing achieved by the second half of the film, which feels like a fever dream composed of a thousand different elements thrown against the wall in the hope some of them stick and make an impact, is how much William wants to be connected to others in a way that actually means something.
It’s obvious he feels cutoff from everyone around him, including Eugene, and really especially Eugene, and that he believes tripping on yagé aka ayahuasca will cure of all kinds of emotional maladies and give him a sense of connectivity to those around him that he is missing and the absence of which causes near unbearable existential pain.
William’s pain, and his grasping, near frenzied hope that it can salved, drives much of Queer which, while it is robbed of lasting emotional impact by a messy second half that isn’t quite sure what it’s doing, is at its heart a searingly touching exploration of what it feels like to be cut off from humanity in meaningfully ways and to be unable to find your way back.
Craig is utterly arresting as William Lee, a man who, whether he is having sex or trying to emotionally relate to someone, is never less than compelling and always awash in the kind of raw vulnerability that feels like someone ripping your soul open.
Watching him is painful at times, but it’s also highly relatable because while many of us don’t end up at the extremes William does, certainly not in the jungles of Ecuador tripping with a man you love but who doesn’t seem to care enough for you, we have all felt some sense of loss and dislocation and a fear that we may find the sense of connection we want and need.
But Queer squanders much of the first half’s narrative impact with a second half that while it remains visually inventive and wildly imaginative – the point at which William and Eugene trip on the yagé is nightmarishly gorgeous and extravagantly artistic – loses any real of emotional intimacy.
That is, until its final devastatingly sad scene, where the full extent of William’s effectively unrequited love for Eugene is laid bare to heartbreaking effect.
Unfortunately, while that scene does strike a real, visceral chord and leaves you aching with sadness for a man whose life never found the connection he needed, nay, craved, it’s a little too late for a film that has, by then, lost its substantial commentary on the human condition in all manner of ill-advised and chaotic artifice.
Where that leaves us with Queer (based on the book of the same name by William S. Burroughs) is a film that has something profound it wants to say but which does not stick the landing, losing its potent observations and heartrending truisms about love, life and the human condition in a blizzard of chaotically wacky scenes and nightmarish oddities which clearly want to MEAN SOMETHING but which simply end up as a messy series of scenes looking for a reason to exist.
Interview with Daniel Craig …