The image onscreen appears just as it did in a 17-year-old Luca Guadagnino’s mind: as an infatuated man gazes at his object of desire, a translucent, almost ghostly version of his hand reaches out to stroke the face of his unwitting beloved. The words that inspired this image—ectoplasmic fingers and a phantom thumb—were written by William S. Burroughs in his 1985 semi-autobiographical novella Queer, which Guadagnino, now 53, read as a “solitary young man” in Palermo, Italy. He began work on an adaptation at 21, years before he’d release his first feature film in 1999. Making Burroughs’ description come to life was “simple,” something out of the “old days” of cinema, the director says. “It’s superimposed, but it’s very strong,” he adds.
With Queer, which opened in select theaters Nov. 27, Guadagnino has achieved not quite the impossible but the unlikely: he’s rendered Burroughs’ freewheeling prose into a coherent film. Set in early-’50s Mexico City, Queer follows Burroughs’ literary alter ego William Lee (played by a multivalent Daniel Craig) as he pursues a younger man, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), who seems impenetrable until he’s not. The courtship takes them into the wilds of South America and finds Lee blazed on alcohol, heroin, and psychedelics. The book is a sequel to 1953’s Junkie and went unpublished for decades. Craig’s performance is big, sometimes explosively so, and requires not only affected charm, but also deep sadness, the physical turmoil of opiate withdrawal, and some bumbling in the jungle. “We all were exhausted by the end,” said Craig. “We were all just hanging in rags by the time we finished.”
Justin Kuritzkes, the writer of Guadagnino’s other 2024 release, Challengers, adapted Burroughs’ novel into Queer’s screenplay. “I was trying to be a medium between these two brilliant queer artists: William Burroughs on the one hand and Luca on the other,” he says. That involved heaps of artistic license—Kuritzkes fleshed out the sex scenes, inserted surreal sequences that allude to the shooting death of Burroughs’ wife Joan Vollmer, for which he was convicted in absentia; and teased out the third act beyond what Burroughs merely suggested. Dr. Cotter, for example, “a small, wiry man in his middle fifties” living in the Ecuadorean jungle, becomes a woman, played with relish by a greasy-haired, dirt-speckled Lesley Manville. Manville underwent about three hours in the hair and makeup chair every day she was on set. “It’s very liberating when you do something like that,” she says. “It’s much nicer than the pressure of having to try and look good on the screen.”
At the same time, much of the film is doggedly faithful to Burroughs’ book, transplanting chunks of dialogue and tracing its overall arc. Guadagnino’s Queer is at once a tribute and an extension, a queering of the very act of adaptation. “You adhere to the book because it’s important to adhere to the source material,” explains Craig.