In the Flesh: Queer

There’s a postcard quality to much of Guadagnino’s framing in Queer, everything cleanly set apart, shadow and light contrasted thoughtfully, sometimes a single element out of place, just to draw attention. A stray dog sniffing at the dirt in an empty street. The moon seen smeared and rippled through dirty glass. There’s a David Hockney-esque quality to these images, an evocation of desolation through the presence of clean lines, soft pastel colors, and mild urban decay. Guadagnino pays evident attention to the play of light on skin, to the glistening sheen of sweat, to the waxy, slightly reflective pallor of an unwashed face. There are characteristic blemishes on his meticulous visuals, though. Jason Schwarzman’s not just unconvincing but actively distracting fat suit. Guadagnino’s inability to shoot, of all things, the rainforest with any kind of distinguishing flair. This second failing in particular is the film’s Achilles’ Heel, hamstringing long stretches of its penultimate sequence.

Close behind it is the uncharacteristically weak soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Its instrumental tracks are, as is typical of the longtime creative duo, largely sterling, but their track selections for the film’s needle drops fail to mesh with its themes or aesthetics. Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ doesn’t heighten or throw into relief anything about queer white expat culture in Mexico City, nor in clashing with the setting does it expose some hidden depth — it’s just the wrong damn choice. As Guadagnino’s control over the film’s aesthetic sensibilities begins to fail, these additional weaknesses only assume greater prominence. Even compounded failure, though, is not enough to derail the fantastic sequence in which wealthy, aging expat Bill Lee (Daniel Craig) and American GI Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) take ayahuasca and experience visions of penetrating one another’s skin with their caresses, the delicate topography of knucklebones and metacarpals shifting under silken flesh as hands glide over unseen muscle. 

Where Queer never falters, though, is with its leads. Craig is captivating as the desperately lonely Lee, whose clinginess, self-loathing, and obsession with breaching the boundary separating him from others feel so heartbreaking it’s often physically difficult to watch and listen to him. Starkey, his much younger lover, gives a diametrically opposed performance, cold and distant, as ambivalent toward his own desires as Lee is captive to his own. The courtship between the two is masterfully sketched, a sort of faintly deniable process of bargaining from which Lee hopes against hope some genuine connection will emerge. By the time he’s being struck and thrown to the floor for trying to initiate a kiss, the architecture of his misery is already so firmly in place that it’s as inescapable as the endless sequence of bare rooms he moved through before Eugene, chasing connection in the cum of beautiful young strangers.