Oh Call Me by Your Name, Call Me by Your Name! Last time Luca Guadagnino directed such an outwardly gay romance story, it was Call Me by Your Name – a movie I’m even afraid to watch again since my first time, I loved it so! It launched Timothée Chalamet for me, and made me really like Armie Hammer briefly before it was reported that, well, …he wanted to eat people 😵 As for Queer, I guess I’m best to lower expectations; that anything could recapture the magic of that previous day is a tough ask. But Guadagnino has made his way back up to the top of my favourite directors recently, with Challengers, and I feel like Daniel Craig has been flirting around the edges of a mega gay performance for quite some time now, through a scene or two in the James Bond franchise, or the pairing of his character with Hugh Grant in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Guadagnino and Daniel Craig – a match made in heaven? The result awaits.
William Lee (Daniel Craig) is a boozing hedonist resident of a holiday escape town in Mexico City occupied mostly by gays seeking their own community in the 1950s. Still, he is somewhat of an outcast, before he lays his eyes on Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), and aims to present himself in the best way possible. Eugene proves to be a tough nut to crack, with Lee only convinced he’s gay, while his buddy Joe (Jason Schwartzman) questions whether the chase is worth the prize. As Lee and Eugene’s relationship takes shape, the movie will take a sharp turn or two before disappearing into the stratosphere! 🚀
I counted seven times where I boldly thought, “what the fuck is going on?” – and, yes, one of them was at Lee’s impression of a squealing pig 😄 I’m going to do my best to explain this movie, since it’s basically the absurdity of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks mixed with Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, for the amount of intoxicants consumed along the way; but with queers, of course! About halfway through the movie, I remembered how this actually isn’t Guadagnino’s first time playing with twisted imagery to make your pupils bulge, referring to Suspiria, where the goal was to evoke a supernatural fear there, but a connection to a higher spiritual realm here. But I think I’m best to put all that aside for now, because I have no clue what I was supposed to be taking away from all the surrealism, other than an uplifting feeling on the importance of connectivity. I especially liked the effects of Lee’s faded persona reaching out to caress Eugene as he wanted. But I really didn’t like the bloody baffling spewing out of lungs and hearts that occurred late in the jungle 😮🤮 Yet, you take the good with the bad, I guess 🤷♂️
Perhaps film scholars are meant to spend the next few decades interpreting and refuting the imagery of Queer like they have done with 2001: A Space Odyssey. But for how odd this movie can get, I always kind’ve liked it, and felt attached to the wispy holiday lifestyle established for most of the film’s setting. The movie’s tone, coinciding with its absurdity, moves to juxtapose the feelings I had about Beau is Afraid – another trip without gravity – but Queer goes to show that just because I don’t align with a movie’s wacky intentionality, doesn’t make it unattractive by nature. No, I’m better off with my feet firm flat on the ground, thank you very much, and at least Queer has the sexual relationship at the center of this movie to hold on to, for something solid. I really like the nature of Lee and Eugene’s relationship, that forms one side of the movie actually, where Lee becomes completely infatuated by Eugene, whom he sees about town. Eugene becomes Lee’s “white whale”, and through the way Eugene smirks at the attention, Lee is with the audience, never sure if Eugene is attracted, or stringing Lee along for some nefarious purposes, later to be revealed. I certainly remember the sex scenes being gentler in Call Me by Your Name – perhaps equally graphic and squirmy for this straight guy, while these are rough and ragged, borderline gross in their animalistic opportunist nature, compared to the tale of budding exploration in the former. Perhaps I just didn’t like to see James Bond shagging another dude here too 💁♂️ But ultimately, I think I appreciated these sex scenes for being different, and depicting another form of gay relations; also informing and spotlighting this relationship as a result.
As Eugene loses interest, if this movie had ended at Lee staring off into the distance after a very thorough depiction of heroin use, then I think we would’ve finished with a sturdy production – albeit short, but commenting on how relationships may be fleeting, and have different levels of impact on a person, depending on how shimmering the subject of desire may appear. I would’ve liked that 👍 But then, as if out of nowhere, our characters are swashbuckling through the jungle, like a new production crew has taken over midmovie and decided on a quest 😕 It truly left me scratching my head, and I wasn’t open to the change, where this movie had been beautiful before. But ultimately, the jungle adventure allows the movie to go all trippy again, and that’s what it wants to do, instantly making Cassandra’s abilities in Deadpool & Wolverine look like amateur hour, with an ayahuasca-fueled dance sequence between Lee and Eugene 💃
I like this movie, but I feel I’m happier when Guadagnino sticks to more grounded productions – like Challengers and A Bigger Splash. But I am also quite impressed by his range, and ability to pull off many types of genres now, from surrealism, to horror, to teen drama, romance, and thriller. His catalogue is a bit like Tarantino, but in a pastel colour – or like the most respected directors of the world, including Martin Scorsese and David Fincher, who play around and stretch themselves to dominate all types of movies, as if they were tennis players mastering different surfaces. Daniel Craig just might make me have to change my Slice Award nominations at the last minute (and we all know, he did), because he is fearlessly playful in this movie, and I think, really enjoying his choices again after becoming stale as Bond (especially during SPECTRE). For characterisation, I really like how Eugene is the epitome of a straight-laced proportioned specimen of a man, where Lee is an addled drug addict, larger and older, always in his white suit that looks like it’s never been washed. But Jason Swartzman – what a departure from what I would usually come to expect from him. Why, was Zack Galifianakis busy? Because the whole movie, it seems like Swartzman is simply doing an impersonation 😄
A deep scrutinous comment on how love can impact the generic flow of life and sit above all on an ethereal plain, I think. Similar in intention to I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
3.5
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