Queer (2024): A brief encounter

"You're not queer"

The word escapes Daniel Craig's mouth like a tendril of smoke, after he takes a moment to swirl it around in his mouth. In considering Luca Guadagnino’s second of two films released in 2024, I found myself again and again coming back to one thing, that damn title: Queer. I can hardly think of another word that has undergone such a culturally significant change in just a few decades, one that evokes profound pain for some and ecstatic liberation for others. Nor can I identify another film that has deconstructed this word so poetically. Guadagnino, in disguise as American expat William Lee, demonstrates that “queer” is so much more than who he goes to bed with. Queer is the way he walks, the books he reads, the clothes he wears, the things in his pockets, the tone of his voice, his sense of humour. Queer is the whole universe.

"I'm not queer; I'm disembodied."

Lee is one of many spectres living in a ghost town. The world around him is punishingly vivid, boasting its tangible beauty to a man whose touch is forbidden. It is Heaven, Hell, and Limbo all at once. "Outdated" technologies like day-for-night and miniatures invoke a sense of the uncanny, the slightly "off". No frame in this picture show is left to chance. Lee's isolation is overbearing to the extent that time and space do not function as they ought to. Guadagnino shows that regardless of the forces that be, queerness will find its way outside of the limitations of the self and grab hold of everything around you. When you are queer, so is the rest of the world and everyone in it.

It is, in essence, a portrait of loneliness. He aches for connection, but the cruel world will not allow it. But Guadagnino is not a solitary filmmaker. He deals almost exclusively in adaptation, bringing the words of others into visual reality. His films are collaborations. Not only is author William S. Burroughs present, but so are dozens of other gay filmmakers to whom Guadagnino lovingly alludes. From different times and spaces, he brings those together who would have never met otherwise. He introduces Murnau to Cocteau in a dark movie theatre. Anger and Weerasethakul meet in the damp, overgrown jungle. Visconti and Fassbinder ponder neorealism in the moonlit streets of Mexico City. They talk to each other without speaking.

"For me, the word queer means anything’s possible."

- Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Guadagnino, perhaps more than any other living filmmaker, is a masterful director of desire. Any viewer, regardless of personal predisposition, feels what Lee feels when he looks at Eugene Allerton; that is, not only physical longing but an inkling of hope that he might feel the same way. Rarely has a filmmaker been willing to be this vulnerable, to reveal so much of himself in the shape of his protagonist. I felt, by adapting Burroughs' novel and bringing Lee to life, that Guadagnino was performing a service to previous generations of gay men, or queers, for whom desire was synonymous with suffering. He is openly confessing for those who could not do so. Those who were at odds with everything around them, those who had to "invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live" (bell hooks). Lee cannot live in this world, it was not made for him. Trying to connect through speech and touch is a futile endeavour. He might as well resort to telepathy.

Just as Orpheus ventures to the Underworld to retrieve his bride Eurydice, so does Lee venture into the jungle to find the connection he has been searching for. Only this time, having made the mistake of looking back at where he came from, it is Orpheus who is left behind.

"What is an experience if it is not shared? Did it even happen?"