The writing of William Burroughs is not for everyone. But even his detractors would agree that he was not in the business of prettification. His loosely autobiographical satires – Junkie, for example, or the novella Queer, which forms the basis for this film – embrace the brutish ugliness of base and animalistic urges. His was a defiantly unsavoury writing voice – prose that was rotten with self-loathing and reeking of stale beer sweat. Whatever else, it came from a place of unvarnished personal truth and authenticity. All of which makes the incongruous approach of Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria; Call Me by Your Name) to this sprawling adaptation of Burroughs’s self-lacerating 1985 story of obsession, addiction and burnout such a tonally jarring misfire.
Admittedly, the film talks the talk, with Burroughs’s words brought to bullish life by Daniel Craig’s ripe performance as William Lee, Burroughs’s alter ego and an American expat in 1950s Mexico City, who spends his time trawling the bars, bleary with tequila and sloppy with lust. Craig is terrific, delivering a wholly committed, vanity-free turn that weaves between swaggering self-importance and a complete lack of dignity. But his performance is continually undermined by the arch artificiality of the film’s design. Shot largely on a set constructed at Rome’s Cinecittà studios, the whole look of the picture screams phoniness. Obvious cinematic fakery isn’t always a problem; I adored Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, which might have been shot inside a giant snowglobe for all the effort it made to embrace realism. But for Burroughs’s worlds, all grit and spit and blood and bitterness, you need a backdrop smeared with the fingerprints of the past inhabitants; a sense that the streets have been lived in, slept and occasionally died on.
Perhaps we don’t notice the micro-narratives seeded by really great production design until presented with inadvertent misdirection such as here. Certainly, there is rubbish strewn in these otherwise oddly immaculate gutters; screwed-up papers and wind-blown leaves. But rather than the aftermath of stumbling drunks, shedding curses and possessions as they pour out of the door of a disreputable drinking den, this is self-conscious, curated disarray. The image that came to my mind was of a harried production assistant scurrying around to check the positioning of all the artfully strewn garbage.
Queer is divided into two sections. The first plays out in Mexico, where Lee lives in a spartan room furnished with little more than a typewriter, a gun and a few ashtrays. Life’s essentials. He frequents the same dive bars as his fellow American dropouts, notably Joe (a scene-stealing Jason Schwartzman), a bearded poet with a taste for the kind of rough trade hook-ups who steal his possessions along with his heart. Lee, in his late 40s, is infatuated with a much younger man, a preppy, clean-cut, coolly uninterested boy named Eugene (Drew Starkey, also impressive). Lee craves Eugene with the same aching urgency he feels for heroin; he pursues both with an unseemly neediness.
When he finally tempts Eugene back to his hotel room, the sex is savage and intense, and accompanied by slithering, pulsing music that sounds like a snake sloughing off its skin. The score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is uneasy and atmospheric, and rather more effective than Guadagnino’s other music choices: deliberately anachronistic tracks such as Prince’s Musicology and Nirvana’s Come as You Are that, like the production design, jolt us out of the story.
When Lee proposes a trip to South America, it’s clear that his motivation is as much about cleaving to Eugene as it is about his quest to find and sample a psychotropic jungle plant called yagé (also known as ayahuasca) in the hope that he might develop psychic abilities. This second section of the film, away from the fake streets of soundstage Mexico City, gets to sticky grips with the grubby, visceral qualities of Burroughs’s grotesque imagery. It’s in this meandering, virtually plotless second section that the film’s unwieldy running time really makes itself felt. The casting is bold: the usually chic and soigne Lesley Manville is virtually unrecognisable as mad scientist and toothless jungle crone Dr Cotter; film-maker Lisandro Alonso plays her largely mute husband. Elsewhere, though, the picture unravels. The yagé trip sequence is overlong, baggy and indulgent. The characters lose all sense of their bodies; the film simply loses its point.
In UK and Irish cinemas
