The Romanticized Squalor of Queer

A triumph in the cinema of alcoholism, Queer gives way, in its second act, to a road movie: Lee descends into the Amazon on the pretense of chasing the ultimate high, yage, but the objective of ensnaring Allerton, whom he pays to accompany him (with twice-weekly sexual encounters stipulated in their agreement), is evidently just as pressing. On trains and buses hurtling through Panama into the Andes, Lee shivers in his overcoat due to high altitudes and detoxification. The availability of cheap, pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and paregoric assuages his symptoms for a spell, but when a suspicious, German-accented physician (Michael Borremans) pegs him for a junkie, Lee must accept Allerton’s hesitant consent to share his bed as his only consolation. As they push forward on the trail of an American botanist named Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), their journey figures desire as a self-perpetuating affliction, an urge for annihilation as much as transcendence.

In order to forge a semblance of resolution for Lee’s odyssey, which ends abruptly in the novella with the couple’s failure to procure yage, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes draw from The Yage Letters (1963), a book largely compiled, like Queer, from correspondence between Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg, his sometime lover, agent, and friend, that describes Burroughs’s acquisition and experience of the drug. Comedy bits lifted verbatim from these letters, absurdist monologues that mutate into imagined dialogues, serve as the backbone of Kuritzkes’s script, but Lee’s ramblings come to a halt once he convinces Cotter to allow him and Allerton to sample the drug. As is pro forma in cinematic depictions of psychedelic experimentation, what was once verbal now is visible, and upon returning to Mexico City two years later, Lee understands that the effects of yage have permanently altered his consciousness: Allerton is gone, but “the Ugly Spirit” that “invaded” him when he killed his wife will stay.

Guadagnino is well versed in the agony of desire, and like Lee, lacks what Burroughs called “the American reluctance to meet the gaze of a stranger.” I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015), and Call Me By Your Name (2017) together constitute the “Desire Trilogy” that first brought Guadagnino international acclaim, and in more recent films—Bones and All (2022), Challengers (2024)—he gives his characters’ cravings for human flesh or athletic victory an erotic charge, reframing all conflict as sex. Guadagnino is Italian, after all, though he has called Queer an homage to British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and especially their 1948 film The Red Shoes—he speculates that they would appreciate the sex scenes in Queer, “which are numerous and quite scandalous.” In Powell and Pressburger’s film, sexual tension is sublimated through dance; in Queer, Lee has not yet discovered the power of art to deflect libido, and thus all that remains to fill the void is sex and drugs, whose visual potential Guadagnino unleashes in special effects and choreography that would not have survived enforcement of 1940s censorship codes.