REEL | Daniel Craig Feels 'Queer' for Longing x WFF 2024

"I want to talk to you without speaking."

Whistler Film Festival

Former James Bond superstar Daniel Craig makes his prestige gay indie film turn for Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino's transfixing screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' mid-century novella, Queer, a 1950s Mexico City-set period romance written in 1952 and published in 1985. It's a heartbreakingly raw portrait of unrequited expat "junkie" love between two men.

Co-starring Drew Starkey as Craig's handsomely younger paramour, Queer focuses on both chemical and physical addiction to both substances and people as the former Bond sheds most of his vanity for an earnest portrayal of post-WWII queerness that's artfully dizzying. A lonely but transformative Craig is just as sweaty and debaucherous as Starkey is thin, put-together, and dreamy. Alternatively, a delightfully stocky Jason Schwartzman shows up for an amusing supporting role as Craig's fellow American sad sack gay buddy.

Scripted by Justin Kuritzkes, the literary material certainly moves at a languid pace culminating in an extended third set in an Ecuadorian rainforest in search of a drug that has surreal "telepathic" properties. However, the moving first half is a much more sensuously idealized vision of middle-aged gay romantic drame before the inevitable detachment of its tragic roots.

Guadagnino vividly evolves his European sense of modern queerness in contemporary cinema. His intimately textured translation of Burrough's thinly-veiled semi-autobiographical material of endless ennui moves beyond the rich expatriate slumming it in a foreign land journey of self-discovery narrative for a fluid yet flawed adaptation that often meanders just as much as it impresses.

Queer screened at the 2024 Whistler Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations program.


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