{"id":1413670,"date":"2024-12-09T14:50:03","date_gmt":"2024-12-09T14:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gaytimes.com\/?p=1413670"},"modified":"2025-01-31T14:56:19","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T14:56:19","slug":"queer-feels-like-the-climax-of-luca-guadagninos-fascination-with-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gaytimes.com\/films\/queer-feels-like-the-climax-of-luca-guadagninos-fascination-with-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer feels like the climax of Luca Guadagnino\u2019s fascination with sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

This mesmerising film stars Daniel Craig and explores sex as a tender, emotive antidote to gay shame <\/span>and the vital, life-affirming power of sensuality. <\/span><\/p>\n

WORDS PATRICK SPROULL<\/strong>\r\nIN PARTNERSHIP WITH MUBI UK\r\n<\/strong><\/pre>\n
Head to\u00a0MUBI<\/a> & sign up for the GT Reader offer for 30 days free streaming to watch Queer now<\/p>\n
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To Luca Guadaganino, the Italian filmmaker and Hollywood\u2019s guiding light on sensual cinema, nothing is ever as it seems. In a cinema landscape starved of eroticism, Guadaganino\u2019s nuanced, granular approach to sex has been a balm. The world of Guadagnino contains invigorating contradictions: cannibalism is romantic, tennis is more than a sport, and, of course, a peach is not just a peach. This playful blurring of what constitutes sex throughout his career makes the (literally) naked intimacy of his newest film, <\/span>Queer<\/span><\/i>, all the more powerful. It feels like the culmination of something the director has been working towards for years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
What makes <\/span>Queer <\/span><\/i>so affecting is that its source material, the William S. Burroughs novella, is anything but. Burroughs\u2019 lead, Lee, a veteran in 1950s Mexico City who subsists on a diet of double tequilas and twinks, is a pitiable figure. He\u2019s unpleasant to be around and decrepit in appearance, yearning pathetically for the attention of anyone around: \u201cAn addict has little regard for his image,\u201d wrote Burroughs. But when we meet Guadagnino\u2019s version of Lee, superbly played by Daniel Craig, he is a far cry from tragic; cutting a sharp figure in his white linen suit, one hand in his pocket, Panama hat doffed to passers-by, he is something of an elegant raconteur.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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The novella<\/span> is semi-autobiographical and semi-complete, written in Mexico when Burroughs fled the USA after being caught in possession of drugs and firearms, and you get the sense that the author, so close to the text, has given up on Lee. Guadagnino, on the other hand, has very much not. Craig\u2019s Lee is a man vibrating with squandered potential, and Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes give him considerable grace, sketching him with more light and shade than Burroughs did. Lee here has frittered his life away on years of military service and a crippling heroin addiction. He spends his days waxing lyrical in bars to a coterie of drinking buddies, performing a more refined form of masculinity than his literary counterpart.<\/span><\/p>\n
Then Eugene Allerton enters Lee\u2019s life. Guadagnino has him enter in slow motion, foregrounded by a cockfight and soundtracked to Nirvana\u2019s \u201cCome as You Are\u201d; it\u2019s an introduction that takes your breath away. In Burroughs\u2019 novella, Allerton could be indistinguishable from any of Lee\u2019s previous pick-ups, but brought to life by Drew Starkey, he is one of Guadagnino\u2019s greatest figures of attraction; maybe the definitive. Where Lee in the novella is lecherous and driven by heroin-induced libido, Craig\u2019s Lee is genuinely besotted and magnetised by Allerton. He becomes a lovesick young man in that moment, and though we never quite understand what makes Allerton tick, what makes him reciprocate Lee\u2019s attraction, it almost doesn\u2019t matter. What distinguishes Allerton and Lee\u2019s relationship from previous Guadagnino trysts is how willingly the filmmaker, after so long, embraces carnality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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The sex in <\/span>Queer <\/span><\/i>comes thick and fast; they are, as Guadagnino <\/span>put it<\/span><\/a>, \u201cnumerous and quite scandalous\u201d. Much has already been made of the nudity and the sweaty, transgressive kick of seeing men fucking; witnessing gay sex handled this authentically and erotically feels like a breakthrough. It is, in some ways, Guadagnino\u2019s horniest film, but in true Luca Guadagnino form, it is a precise, considered horniness. The sex in <\/span>Queer<\/span><\/i> \u2013 Lee\u2019s pursuit and domination of Allerton \u2013\u00a0feels like the release of years of tension in the director\u2019s filmmaking. When Allerton, reclined on a bed, allows Lee to go down on him, Guadagnino splices the scene with shots of the Mexico City nightscape through every window in the apartment. It playfully recalls <\/span>Call Me by Your Name<\/span><\/i>\u2019s infamous pan out of the window from Elio and Oliver when they finally fuck. Guadagnino made this decision because, in his words, bearing witness to that scene would have been an \u201c<\/span>unkind intrusion<\/span><\/a>\u201d; in <\/span>Queer<\/span><\/i>, Guadagnino\u2019s camera is empathetic and necessary. For once, he allows us to stay in the room.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Lee\u2019s euphoria, his unabashed horniness for Allerton, is the heart of <\/span>Queer<\/span><\/i>; the sex is its lungs. Lee is a soul filled with self-loathing, hollowed out by a lifetime of repression, and with Allerton, he begins to slowly colour in the blanks. It\u2019s a testament to Craig\u2019s performance that Lee feels quite so achingly real, an intensely troubled man isolated from himself and others by his queerness. Finding pleasure in Allerton is the light at the end of the tunnel and for Guadagnino, who has always been choosy over whether to consummate his characters\u2019 relationships, it is a startling change of pace.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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Earlier this year, in Guadagnino\u2019s kinetic, uber-hot tennis drama, he took a very different approach. \u201cThe tennis is the sex,\u201d <\/span>said<\/span><\/a> star Josh O\u2019Connor. You\u2019d struggle to find anyone who disagrees. The love triangle at its core \u2013 consisting of O\u2019Connor, Mike Faist, and Zendaya \u2013 thrashed it out on the court instead of the bedroom. Guadagnino\u2019s constant blueballing of the audience, teasing and never delivering in the conventional sense, was <\/span>Challengers<\/span><\/i>\u2019 real grand slam. Frustrating as it was, there was no world in which <\/span>Challengers <\/span><\/i>could be explicit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
It was the same for <\/span>Bones and All<\/span><\/i>, Guadagnino\u2019s 2022 romance about two cannibals who fall in love. Sex was never shown and cannibalism took its place; in <\/span>Bones and All<\/span><\/i>, resisting and eventually consuming a loved one was the greatest act of intimacy. Again, Guadagnino lensed his characters\u2019 physical attraction through something other than explicit sex. Even in his 2009 film <\/span>I Am Love<\/span><\/i>, the sex scenes are shown but mostly in tasteful close-up \u2013 lips pressed against skin, a mouth open in pleasure, a hand gripping a scalp. Sex becomes a jigsaw to put together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
This all makes <\/span>Queer<\/span><\/i>\u2019s sensual, complete portrait of lust hit like a wave. Guadagnino has always been a master of portraying love, capable of negotiating the balance between sex and romance. By finally portraying gay sex in <\/span>Queer<\/span><\/i>, so generously and so fondly, he is giving the act layers upon layers of meaning. It is the height of a career dedicated to portraying sex as erotically and authentically as possible. As Lee throws himself body and soul into his lust for Allerton, so, too, does Luca Guadagnino.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Head to\u00a0MUBI<\/a> & sign up for the GT Reader offer for 30 days free streaming to watch Queer now<\/h4>\n