Queer, Not Even Daniel Craig’s Immersive Performance Can  Salvage This Clunky Gay Drama

Let’s face it. Almost all of  Luca Guadagnino’s  reputation as an audacious auteur hinges on Call Me By Your Name. Since then Luca has made an underwhelming tennis triangle The  Challengers where  I wasn’t sure the men loved the women or each other.

   The  gay  drama Queer which  features  a trueblue  superstar, Mr Bond Daniel Craig himself, bonding with the boys at the  hip and lip.

 This is  Mexico in the  1950s and the stench  of periodicity and decadence hits you  hard  as author William Lee(Daniel Craig) cruises the bars, thereby raising the bar for  his performing reportcard. It is indeed a brave performance though not in the  look-what-I-can-do  way, but  a quietly uninhibited way.

 Lee’s initial wooing of  the young wiry  bi-sexual Eugene Allerton(an impressively languid Drew Starkey) reeks of the musk  of  debauchery.Yup, this is a world of  cruisers and  boozards  that Luca Guadagnino knows  well, perhaps  even  better than author William Burroughs on whose novella this film is based.

  The  freefalling degeneracy  of Mexico in the1950 gives Lee and his ilk the licence to be freely  licentious. The director captures  that  world of immeasurable appetites with  a prickly cheekiness.

    But then the narration  begins to  get restless.  Lee wants to travel, and  not alone. He wants to take Eugene on  a long trip to South America. There  is desperation in Lee’s plea as he offers to not only fund Eugene’s trip but also to  make sure no conditions apply. This in practical terms means  Eugene doesn’t have  to sleep with Lee.

   Unlimited freedom has always been at the core of all art cinema and  drama of decadence. Queer  goes  a step further. It removes the protagonist from his  horny habitat and  follows him into an out-of-body experience  in the  jungles of South America.

  Henceforth Queer becomes a kaleidoscope  of  directorial  selfindulgence with contorted  disembodied  images  representing a  world gone largely  askew.

It is  a world snarled in contradictions and  not  beautiful  to behold. Queer is a problematic view  of  homoeroticism  filled with an unexpressed anguish. It has seeds of significance wedged in the welters  of  hedonism. And some notable  performance. But at the  end  we are  none the wiser about the  demons that inhabit the protagonist’s mind. And we don’t care.