14/40
In 1950s Mexico City, an American immigrant in his late forties lives a lonely life in a small American community. However, the arrival of a young student leads the man to finally form a meaningful relationship with someone. Ultimately, it was Daniel Craig who convinced Luca Guadagnino to cast Drew Starkey after watching Guadagnino’s audition videos and telling him, “This is the guy,” after seeing Starkey’s film… William Lee: Sit on Your Ass! Or What’s Left of Him After Four Years in the Navy. Starring The Graham Norton Show: Daniel Craig/Nicola Coughlan/Jesse Eisenberg/Kieran Culkin/Flo (2024). I’ve never seen Naked Lunch (1991), but I found myself thinking about it often during the screening of Queer at the 2024 London Film Festival: probably to be expected, since William S. Burroughs provided the basis for both films. In 1950s Mexico, William Lee, an American writer on the wrong side of… forty? Fifty?, his days are spent drinking, shooting, and casually having sex with other men. One day, a muscular, smart young man named Eugene comes into the bar, and Lee is smitten. But what does Eugene want? And then there’s this telepathic drug to think about… I’m not sure what director Luca Guadagnino is trying to achieve stylistically with this film. The sets are decorated almost entirely in block colors – matte red and olive green, for example – and have this slightly surreal, clean Technicolor look that makes me think the intention is to pay homage to the films of the era in which the film is set. But if that’s the case, why this decidedly atypical 1950s rock and techno soundtrack? Daniel Craig (am I imagining it or is he starting to look like Sid James?) is hampered in the lead role, having to constantly deliver meaningless speeches in an accent that is clearly not his. Drew Starkey offers a more subtle performance as the manipulative Eugene and certainly looks classy. Leslie Manville is unrecognizable as a doctor living in the South American jungle – big kudos to the makeup team! This is the kind of movie where I care more about the artistic style than the content of the story. It was good once, but I won’t watch it again.
