TIFF 2024: Queer (and Daniel Craig’s Post-Bond Weirdness)

Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig join forces to adapt William Burroughs. It’s messy (but hot.)

It’s the 1940s. While the Second World War rages on, the American ex-pats who reside in Mexico City seem oblivious to the outside world. William Lee (Daniel Craig) wanders from bar to bar, drinking tequila and looking for guys to hook up with. His is a life of aimless leisure, funded by an outside source and without responsibilities any more pressing than his next score. One night, he lays eyes on Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a discharged Navy serviceman, and is immediately obsessed. It hardly seems to matter to Lee that Eugene might not be queer. What’s most important is that he satisfies his hunger, both for sex and drugs, and what he craves in terms of the latter is a hot new psychedelic known as yage. 

Adapting a William S. Burroughs novel is no mean feat. His work often defied literary characterization and prurient notions of plot and character. His most infamous works depict semi-autobiographical experiences with hard drug use and the complete descent into fantasy that accompanies heroin dependency. In bringing Naked Lunch to life, David Cronenberg made it a memoiristic study of Burroughs himself, albeit one with bug typewriters and aliens that secrete goo from their heads. For Luca Guadagnino, adapting Queer was only marginally easier. It’s a less surreal read but one no less fascinated by the unreliable experience of addiction. 

Queer is a messy film about a messy person. Lee is an outsider: he’s a white American in Mexico and a gay man living in a decade where the early queer rights movements are only just beginning. With no need to work thanks to an unnamed source of financial support, Lee spends his days doing little more than drinking and hooking up (or complaining that nobody wants to hook up with him), wearing a sweat-drenched white suit and carrying a pistol in his belt. A small community of fellow gay American men mingle in cafes and bars, sharing stories about disastrous dates and the ones who got away. Lee loves to put on a show to his audience of four or five, but the moment he lays eyes on Eugene over a cock fight (get it?), he loses all sense of cool. Swapping one addiction for another isn’t necessarily recommended for heroin junkies (just ask Lee when he decides to commit to cocaine for a while.)

Eugene is, ostensibly, straight. He says on more than one occasion that he’s “not a queer” (everyone says “queer” rather than “gay”, an othering term that still carries a lot of stigma for LGBTQ+ people of a certain generation.) He seems amused by Lee’s obvious adoration of him at first, but it also sends him into a spiral over his own sexuality. By agreeing to be Lee’s part-time lover, an agreement Lee all but begs for, he seems ready to explore that which he cannot do back home in the States. Being Lee’s part-time companion is an endless push-pull act of control, one that sends them to South America where Lee is eager to try out the near-mythic hallucinogen ayahuasca, which he believes will allow him to hone his perceived clairvoyant powers. 

There’s a furious eroticism that permeates Queer throughout the first third of its admittedly overlong running time. Everyone is sweating and horny. Every walk Lee goes on, usually from bar to bar, is an opportunity for a pick-up. Seedy hotels are open for one-night stands. It’s all hugely unreal, emphasized by sets that look like Hopper paintings and backdrops that are only a couple of steps away from a 1950s-style projection in a Hitchcock film. By the time Eugene and Lee consummate their situationship, the tension has only grown more unbearable between them. Lee invites him to be his travel companion/f*ck buddy in South America, where he deals with the ravages of withdrawal. Eugene only has to be intimate with him a couple of times a week, and any time Lee tries to overstep that quota, he is violently pushed away. Does he even want Lee? Does it matter?

In the final third, the tone shifts wildly as Lee and Eugene end up in the jungles of Ecuador in search of yage. Their guide is an American botanist played by cackling and unrecognizable Lesley Manville, who informs them that the revelations offered by this drug may not be what they seek. It's here where Queer takes an unexpected turn into the surreal, with some body horror moments that play like the sexy version of The Substance. Burroughs’ work famously detailed how drug use stripped away your grounding from reality, and Guadagnino is at his most confident in playing around with this on an aesthetic level. 

The tonal dissonances feel somewhat accurate to the spirit of the book, but they also expose the sheer madness of trying to narrativize a Burroughs book conventionally. Queer is actually one of Burroughs' most sincere books (not a talking anus in sight!) but it still struggles to be categorized in any vaguely conventional way. That means that Guadagnino's film (with Justin Kuritzkes of Challengers fame – and Mr. Celine Song – on screenwriter duties) can't help but feel more like a series of vignettes than a cohesive whole. It's at its most thriling when it lets Craig bare his soul, but there are a lot of distractions from that, and those glimmers of a wider world feel small because we don't get enough time with them over the course of 135-minutes (I desperately wanted more of Drew Droege as the effete Truman Capote-style leader of Mexico City's American gay scene.) 

I do, however, draw the line at the intrusions of popular music throughout. When Lee and Eugene first meet, “Come As You Are” by Nirvana kicks in and it just doesn’t work. Prince songs also pop up. It’s an intriguing idea, I suppose, to blend the oft-coded sensuality of the not-too-distant past with some modern f*ck songs, but it proves more distracting than anything else. It also takes away from the otherwise striking and discordant score by the always-reliable Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (although it’s not the wall-to-wall bangers of their Challengers score.) 

Of course Daniel Craig is excellent here. It might be his greatest work, although it would have to fight for the top spot with Logan Lucky and Enduring Love in my book. As Lee, he is achingly vulnerable but desperate to hide it behind a veneer of showboating charm. He talks of being gay like it’s part duty, part burden. Love leaves him as naked as addiction, and Craig finds immense pathos in what could have been pitiable. If anything, Craig might be a little too good as his magnetic performance can’t help but draw our eyes away from Drew Starkey, who is doing some strong work here but never draws our attention the way that Lee does, which is a problem when Eugene is supposed to be so addictive to look at. Their chemistry is great but the romance lands less successfully than the f*cking. 

When Daniel Craig passes away, the term “James Bond actor” will be in the first line of his obituary. That’s just how it goes when you spend a huge chunk of your career in the leading role of one of the world’s most iconic film franchises. By the end of his tenure as the slutty spy, Craig was clearly over it, which led to some hilariously blunt interviews and a COVID-extended release schedule for the final film, No Time to Die, that left him looking ready to jump off a dam sans parachute. You could hardly blame him. Some of his Bond films are amazing but others were sorely lacking, especially that last one, and he seemed trapped by the role. His non-Bond films from that era weren’t as interesting as what he was up to before he donned the tuxedo, although he at least got to do some good stage work. 

You look at the stuff he did in the late ‘90s and early 2000s and it’s kind of amazing he ever got to be Bond. He played the infamous painter Francis Bacon’s lover in Love is the Devil. He’s in the legendary BBC miniseries Our Friends in the North, as well as tricksy indie titles like Enduring Love. He’s an undeniable hottie but he also has Character Actor face. Plus, he was, gasp, blonde, and that alone made some Bond purists furious. 

But he understood the assignment. The Craig Bond era was meant to be focused on bringing the character back to his grounded roots after the Brosnan years ended in Roger Moore-esque fantasy scenarios. Craig’s Bond is suave, sure, but he’s also clearly a borderline sociopath. He’s so messed up by his occupation but isn’t capable of doing anything else. More than any Bond before him, he’s the result of MI5’s training. Also, he’s easily the first Bond who probably isn’t straight, or at least is open to sexual fluidity. Come on, did you see Javier Bardem flirting up a storm with him in Skyfall? Or Mads Mikkelsen pummeling his balls in Casino Royale? I’m surprised we didn’t get more fanfiction out of this. 

Getting out of the Bond world meant Craig could be freer, quirkier, and sillier. His biggest role since then has been as Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, wherein he dons the most outrageous Southern dandy accent this side of Foghorn Leghorn. Blanc is so patently ridiculous, the Columbo of high drag. He’s a genius but he also just enjoys f*cking with people. You can tell Craig is having the time of his life with his weirdo who wears a cute striped one-piece in the pool and sings along to Sondheim in his car (seriously, who ever thought Blanc was straight? We’d better get to see him and his husband Hugh Grant in the next film.)

Mostly, I’m just excited to see Craig pushing himself and doing it with such relish. There was no guarantee that he’d be able to have an amazing post-Bond career. His predecessors had mixed results when they drank their last martini. Queer seems to be the first time that Craig has received genuine awards buzz, and 2024 is shaping up to be one of the weaker Best Actor years in memory. He could very well dominate the season thanks to a great performance and solid narrative. But don’t let that be the only reason to see Queer. The work stands strong without all of that going on on the sidelines, even if the film itself is a shakier affair.

Thanks for reading. I am now back home in Scotland after my week at TIFF and I am desperately trying to fight off jetlag. I really appreciate everyone who kept up with my coverage of the festival, both here and on Pajiba (my favourite film of the fest was Babygirl, my least favourite Vice is Broke.) I’ve got some fun stuff planned for the coming weeks so I hope you’ll stick around.