Queer: Steamy period drama 

Rating:

Hats off to Daniel Craig. The 56-year-old star could hardly be trying harder, after those five James Bond films in 15 years, to shrug off the image of Ian Fleming’s ultra-heterosexual alpha-male super-spy. 

First Craig played the discreetly gay master detective Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out films, and now he has cast discretion aside altogether in the torridly physical Queer, which had its world premiere last night at the Venice Film Festival.

Adapted from William S Burroughs’ autobiographical novel of the same title, Queer is set in the early 1950s mostly in Mexico City. There, among other gay American expats, dissolute writer William Lee (Craig) spends his time drinking tequila by the barrel-load and chasing young men.

One of them is Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), with whom Lee quickly becomes infatuated. 

At first he isn’t entirely sure whether Gene shares his ‘proclivities’, and refrains from making a move while director Luca Guadagnino very artfully uses camera and editing-suite trickery to show how Lee is yearning to do with his body what he yet can’t. 

But soon enough the pair are lovers, cue some sweaty and extremely graphic sex scenes which might startle folk who still think firmly of Craig as 007, one of fiction’s most irrepressible seducers to be sure, but only of women.

Mind you, he doesn’t really look like Bond in this film. Lee is permanently unshaven, sports a mid-century haircut, and is almost always drunk. 

Craig does a magnificent job of making him seem completely real: a feckless, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, drug-addicted, pistol-toting, promiscuously ‘queer’ barfly in an environment in which none of the above really make him stand out from the pack.

That pack includes another promiscuous American expat, played with glorious loucheness by Jason Schwartzman, whose encounters with young Mexicans always seem to end up with them robbing him.

Nor is Lee especially happy, even after bedding Gene. The younger man is a flighty sort, seemingly attracted to women as well as men. 

In desperation Lee offers him an arrangement. Will Gene come with him to South America, and be ‘nice to me twice a week’, if he picks up the tab?

It is not really clear how Lee makes a living since he always seems far too inebriated to write, and if the film has a flaw then it’s this: there’s not enough of a back story. 

Nor, frankly, is there at first much of a narrative. Lee fancies Gene rotten and that’s about it. But the look of the film, the period detail, is exquisitely handled. For those who don’t know the work of William S Burroughs think Graham Greene instead. 

If there’d been a decidedly rakish gay theme in Greene’s novels about Latin America in the mid-20th century, this film would feel like being plunged into one of them. You can almost feel the heat, taste the chillis, smell the perspiration.

Moreover, narrative-wise, things are about to hot up in more ways than one. After recovering from dysentery and other illnesses related to his prodigious intake of heroin and cocaine, Lee takes Gene deep into the Ecuadorean rainforest in search of a drug called ‘yage’, which is said to confer telepathic powers on those bold (or idiotic) enough to take it, as well as mad hallucinations.

From this point the movie too becomes downright nuts, as if Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who also collaborated on this year’s excellent Challengers) have themselves been on the yage.

But it yields its most extraordinary performance, from Lesley Manville as an alarmingly formidable, borderline-unhinged American botanist and doctor who has long since gone native, is embedded in the jungle, and knows how to satisfy her questful visitors.

It’s not easy to steal this film from Craig but if anyone manages it, Manville does. 

Angelina Jolie probably has the Best Actress award wrapped up here in Venice, for her committed performance as the opera singer Maria Callas in the uneven Maria, but if Manville gets a Best Supporting nod when the Oscar nominations come round, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Queer is worth seeing for her alone, but for plenty besides.

There is as yet no confirmed UK release date for Queer.