Some authors are so resistant to adaptation that attempting transfer to another medium stands little chance of seeming much more than an act of willful perversity. Probably high on that list is William S. Burroughs, a singular personality and literary experimentalist. Luca Guadagnino’s movie of Queer—the unfinished novel Burroughs finally consented to have published in 1985, three decades after he’d written and abandoned it—is in some ways its director’s best film since I Am Love 15 years ago. Yet it’s also fundamentally odd and frustrating in ways redolent of David Cronenberg’s 1991 Naked Lunch, another Burroughs-derived film similar not only in tone and themes, but in having that particular air of a translation that’s intriguing largely because of the ways in which it doesn’t, or can’t, work.
Daniel Craig is Lee, the author’s transparent stand-in, a middle-aged expatriate in mid-1950s Mexico for reasons we only eventually glean—there’s a late nod to the “William Tell act” that resulted in Burroughs shooting his spouse Joan Vollmer while both were drunk. (He wrote Queer while awaiting trial for this supposedly accidental death, and in real life fled to the US from Mexico, rather than vice versa.) He haunts bars looking for male trade, maintaining an arms-length relationship towards the more conspicuously camp gay expats doing likewise—he both marks himself as a sexual outlaw and denies identifying with any group.
Lee is strongly attracted to Eugene (Drew Starkey), an ostensibly heterosexual ex-Navy enlistee. The initially evasive young man is not immune to the appeal of a moneyed older man’s interest, or even his bed. Nonetheless, they’ve already fallen out somewhat when Lee convinces Eugene to join him on a South American jaunt that turns out to have a goal: Finding one Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville) deep in the Amazonian jungle, and accessing the natural psychedelics she has purportedly “discovered” are used in local tribal rituals seeking spiritual transcendence.
Nearly two and a half hours, Guadagnino’s Queer is surprisingly compelling for something with so little “plot.” Much of that is due to Craig’s richly mannered performance, which captures all Burroughs’ contradictions without becoming an impersonation. There’s also the impressive daring of the sex scenes—this is almost certainly the most expensive movie ever to get quite so explicit about guy-on-guy action, involving an ex-007 to boot. (Of course you have to suspend disbelief that Eisenhower-era characters this sodden with drink, plus Lee’s heroin usage, would still have the ripped naked physiques of gym rats.) As ever, this director steeped in luxury brand campaigns is all about the luxurious surface. Every design factor here, from the meticulous period costumes to the anachronistic soundtrack choices (New Order, Prince, Sinead O’Connor covering Nirvana) that abet Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ original score, has a fetishistic, curated feel that is both inviting and gratuitous.
Moment to moment, Queer has an undeniable fascination—at the same time that any precise point is hard to suss out. Does Guadagnino identify with Burroughs, as a sort of fellow unicorn? The real man and the alter ego onscreen were/are true eccentrics, mixing a confrontative obstinacy, thinly disguised self-loathing, and refusal to accept being “gay” while nonetheless acting on gay desires. His adventurous writing pushed boundaries, yet as an individual the author seemed primarily to be in the business of pushing society away. His was a life like an objet d’art, unique and hard to relate to. The film Queer, too, ultimately feels like something you’d put on a shelf under glass, where it can be admired if not exactly used. It opens Fri/6 in SF Bay Area theaters.
The limits of living in an ostensibly accepting, liberated gay community are probed in Marco Calvani’s debut feature as writer-director, High Tide. Handsome Brazilian emigre Lourenco (Marco Pigossi) ought to be ecstatic to have landed in Provincetown, particularly since he’s at least temporarily escaped a hometown so backward that he’s still in the closet there. But his visa is running out, the American boyfriend who brought him here has abandoned him (indeed it seems never-seen “Joe” has already moved on romantically), and our shy hero is ill at ease amidst quickie vacation pickups and economically advantaged long-time residents. An accountant by profession, he’s stuck doing odd physical-labor jobs for an exploitative boss, while allowed to stay in an in-law unit owned by an older gay man (Bill Irwin) whose views are unconsciously racist and condescending.
A bright spot is his meeting Maurice (James Bland), a Black nurse from Manhattan with whom he forges something potentially more than a one-night stand. But that relationship, too, has its points of prickly negotiation that Lourenco lacks expertise in navigating. High Tide is one of those movies that has to make the rest of a scene repellent in order to make our protagonists seem comparatively depthed—Irwin and Mad Men actor Bryan Batt’s characters are stereotypes of smug GWM privilege. But the emotional remoteness that marks Queer is nowhere to be found in this very touching drama, which quickly transcends stock “sexy summer fling” gay romcom territory to poignantly deal with issues such films rarely take seriously. While Lourenco may be gorgeous, his struggles with being depressive, an introvert, and at active risk of deportation are empathetically palpable. High Tide opens Fri/6 at the Roxie in SF.
Two other new movies explore milieus in which dominant male energy assumes a more distinctly aggressive, even warlike tenor. Australian director Justin Kurzel weighs into recent US history with The Order, about events in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1980s. Jude Law plays an FBI agent dispatched to a rural Washington state community on the suspicion that a series of robberies is not being committed for the usual purely-financial reasons, but to support a hate group. Local police aren’t thrilled at first by this boozy bigshot’s intrusion—they doubt anything hereabouts could be relevant to an agent who’s previously dealt with the likes of the KKK and Cosa Nostra.
Unfortunately, it turns out he’s right: The forces robbing banks, blowing up porn theaters, and assassinating critics (like Mark Maron as a Denver talk-radio host who rails against far-right paranoiacs) turn out to be a fast-growing white supremacist group drawing on the economic discontent of young men. Their leader, played by Nicholas Hoult, is a chillingly charismatic evangelical-preacher’s son whose own personal “bible” is race-war roadmap The Turner Diaries. His venom against all “others” comes wrapped in the scarifying zeal of a self-assigned messianic mission. As the authorities close in, a body count rises.
Made in an unadorned but intense docudrama style, The Order is suspenseful and exciting without being hyperbolic. While the real-life “Order’s” story ended in a shootout and numerous lengthy prison sentences almost exactly 40 years ago, our sad reality is that its legacy remains more relevant than ever today. The film opens Fri/6 at Bay Area venues including SF’s AMC Metreon and the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville.
Turning back the clock a few millennia, there’s The Return from Italian director Uberto Pasolini, whose excellent modern-day drama Nowhere Special was also released this year (albeit nearly four years after its festival debut). This is very different from that intimate piece, but it nonetheless brings epic events down to a gritty, personal scale. What we’ve got here is basically the latter half of The Odyssey, as King Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) returns at last to Ithaca. But he’s been gone so long—fighting the Trojan War, a captive of nymph Calypso, losing all his men at sea, etc.—that no one recognizes the worn old man who washes back onto his native shore.
Deciding to use this anonymity to his advantage, Odysseus poses as a beggar while absorbing the misery and chaos that’s engulfed his fiefdom since he left. Wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) continues to wait for his return. But everyone else assumes him dead, including their son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer). The latter can do little to repel the encampment of loutish suitors for his mother’s hand (and her husband’s kingdom) that have accrued over the years, terrorizing the locals in their bored amusements as they press Penelope to “choose” among them. When Odysseus—who’s not nearly so frail as he looks—finally makes his presence known, these intruders will live to regret their hubris. Well, actually, no…they won’t live.
The script by recently deceased playwright Edward Bond, John Collee, and Pasolini by way of Homer takes a terse, somber approach to the famous saga, deleting all supernatural elements and any ceremonious, stilted language. Likewise, the director avoids both sense of spectacle and/or theatrical ritual applied by most prior interpreters in modern media. What’s left is an ugly tale of abuse and vengeance set in a world where the gods seem very remote. Even royalty has no glamour—the “palace” Penelope & son live in is a dank stone tomb surrounded by piggish, violent men and actual pigsties.
The lack of grandiosity may limit some of the power here, though on its own terms The Return works. It gets all the conviction it needs from Fiennes’ gnarled intensity, with Binoche (his co-star for the first time since The English Patient) also bringing considerable force to the table. This is not a fun, flamboyant action movie set in ancient times a la Gladiator II, though neither is it a downbeat grind. Just about the only compromise to current popular tastes is all the shirtless male pulchritude on display—maybe those suitors go to the same gym as the protagonists of Queer. The Return opens in theaters Fri/6, with SF Bay Area venues TBA at presstime.
