Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.William S Burroughs is perhaps the most radically unadaptable of fiction writers. If you want to get close to American literature’s high priest of transgression, then you have to get Burroughsian. David Cronenberg did it in his nightmare imagining of the radically unfilmable Naked Lunch; now here is a differently dreamlike take on a less intransigent Burroughs book, the autobiographical Queer, with Daniel Craig as the writer’s alter ego William Lee.In Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, we find Lee living in Mexico in the 1950s, where he spends his time drifting between bars, using heroin and pursuing young men — some available, others giving brutal rebuffs which he shrugs off with a sardonic comment and an imperiously swaggering departure. Then he falls for a handsome American — Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), who tantalisingly returns his glances, drinks with him, then eludes him again, keeping Lee painfully captivated. The fact that Starkey’s Allerton is depicted as looking very much like a young Burroughs himself (slicked hair, wan, sober-faced) makes it seem as though Lee has fallen for his own idealised double.Shooting almost entirely on sets, Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom contrive lavish interplay between realism, dream and old-school cinematic illusion. Bars, apartments and streets all have intensely detailed precision (Mexican movie posters, weathered copies of Proust etc) with tableaux resembling Edward Hopper paintings and swooning lush trompe-l’oeil skies; slyly undercutting the period realism is a soundtrack taking in New Order, Prince, Nirvana.The Mexican chapter (one of three, plus epilogue) is the most successful; what follows involves the two men’s trip to South America and Lee’s quest for yage, a plant with supposedly telepathy-inducing qualities. All this diffuses the spell somewhat, before the film leaps into a register of shaky psychedelia; but you can’t help marvel at a lank-haired, mud-stippled Lesley Manville, ferociously loopy as a jungle botanist. Then there’s the coda — a fever dream that coasts dangerously close to David Lynch as it weaves in further elements of Burroughs mythology.Throughout, though, Craig is mesmerising. His Lee has something of a jaded old diplomat from a Graham Greene novel — a weary flâneur hovering between amusement and desperation, making conspiratorial badinage with his drinking pals (notably Jason Schwartzman, bulked up and bearded as an Allen Ginsberg surrogate). Craig doesn’t impersonate Burroughs’ Missouri drawl, but gives us the literary-patrician grandiloquence with a muscular languor as Lee saunters along in a white suit and fedora, at once athletic and profoundly vulnerable.This hypnotic, often moving film speaks eloquently — in some scenes, graphically — about queer carnal ecstasy, and about the difficulty of its pursuit. It is a remarkable achievement by the prolific Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, this year’s Challengers). But at times he lays on the rapture a bit thick, making Queer a little incongruous: a swooning hymn to beauty by a director who is an arch-aesthete, in tribute to a writer who was many things — an ironist, a satirist, a visionary gazer into the abyss — but an aesthete, hardly.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from December 13 and in US cinemas now
