Saw Queer yesterday.
Frankly, I felt Luca was out of his depth (since we're all on first name terms here).
What made Call Me by Your Name and Challengers exciting was the eroticisation of the quotidian: la dolce vita, if you will. The sexual dynamics are complex but there is no moral didacticism. The flesh is pure pleasure. Look at him eat that banana! Look at that dimple! Look at it! Yes, the characters suffer - but they still look hot doing it.
The problem with his Queer, overall, is that everything is TOO beautiful. Look at the shadows cast by the modernist architecture! Look at that nipple! Look at that lemon yellow of the arches inside the Ship Ahoy (but seriously, I would kill for this exact shade of yellow). I would like to say that it is Wes Anderson on acid, but most of the time it is just straight-up Wes Anderson. Every frame tries to be an Edward Hopper painting. There is very little of the sordidness that is never far from the surface with Burroughs.
The actors, though, understood the assignment. Daniel Craig - accurately described by Peter Bradshaw as "needy, horny and mesmeric" (two out of three aint bad, my gen z boyfriend says gesturing in my direction) - deserves an OBE for, inter alia, sucking like a champ. Drew Starkey is a dream from beginning (that look!) to end and will henceforth be a pleasant fixture in all of my best dreams. Jason Schwartzman is a delight as the queer and fat-bodied sidekick, basically a bridge troll compared to the rest of the ensemble (The film also joyfully fails the Bechdel test, accurately representing the queer reality.)
The less said about the Jumanji-style Jungian symbolism and the interpretative dance sequence meant to convey the intensity of an ayahuasca journey the better, but Luca achieved the neoconservative aim of making drugs look as lame as possible - you shoot up and then you just sit there and listen to like 90s dude rock? Sounds boring. It seems to do wonders for the body, though, at least to the image of the body, and that is in the end what matters, isn't it? Isn't it?
Luca's thrilling amoral hedonism is revealed to not go very far beyond good and evil: we end up with the beautiful and the not so beautiful - although even the ugly is portrayed as beautiful: the blood and guts are art directed for the gods. Like Saltburn, it edges towards the truly shocking, but pulls away too quickly. Like The Substance, it does not so much pay homage to Jodorowsky and Lynch and Coppola and Kubrick and Kubrick and Kubrick as directly replicate them. Why do we seem fated to relive a facsimile of the 70s, culturally speaking? Or will we be moving swiftly to the 80s now?
A missed opportunity (there hasn't been a good drug movie since, I dunno, Enter the Void?), especially since the refrain of the film sounds like an affirmation that everybody's favourite non-binary e-witch Ash del Greco might have offered to one of their clients: "I'm not (a) queer, I'm disembodied..."
