“It’s always nice to see places you’ve never been before…”
***
No, one can’t be blamed for finding QUEER overly disjointed and elliptical and, as a result, less than wholly satisfying. That’s kind of the point, though.
To be sure, the section set in the Ecuadorian rainforest is hit or miss at best, with many moments or even entire scenes somewhat goofy and low in ambition, with unnecessarily broad performances and poorly defined/realized spaces. In fact, audiences could be forgiven the creeping suspicion that they’re experiencing not simply a different movie but, in a sensation oddly more troubling, the same movie now under the guidance of a completely different filmmaker.
Of course, the self-consciously trippy yage/ayahuasca sequence, chock full of mystical sensuality, not only redeems some of the pedestrian quality of that which preceded it, but also protagonist William Lee himself. In a sense, we’re set up: just as Daniel Craig’s Lee and Drew Starkey’s Eugene Allerton confide to each other that the native “vegetation” has had no apparent effect on them only to be stunningly awakened from this misperception, we’re lulled into thinking we’re in a place of disappointing conventionality only to have the rug pulled out from under us. Or perhaps the floor itself. Or the Earth itself.
Still, where is the dazzling movie, rife with visual voluptuousness and exhilarating music, that we thrilled to for the first hour or more? Our longing for a more user-friendly narrative, with Craig’s presence, equal parts dapper and decrepit, as the centerpiece, is palpable—and telling.
If there’s a running theme in director Luca Guadagnino’s work, evident in CHALLENGERS and BONES AND ALL (and arguably SUSPIRIA as well), it concerns the way we navigate our own “perverse,” almost inexplicable desires and, moreover, the unpredictable and chaos-inducing costs of obtaining the objects of those desires. With QUEER, he digs deeper. And that doesn’t mean his goal is to reframe or even mildly renounce sexual desire in favor of “connection,” whether emotional and metaphysical. The film’s coda, including its epilogue, make this clear; desire itself is never truly transcended, nor should it be, but rather transfigured. Yes, physical desire is often just that—physical—but it’s also an expression of our quest for meaning, and the urge to share that quest with another (the romantic’s view of love). In QUEER, those dichotomies of lust and love, of self-abusive intoxication and self-actualizing ecstasy, are revealed to be gloriously false. Desire itself perhaps can’t be resisted—but it can be questioned, accepted, valued, and made peace with.
The same is true of our own cinematic desire, and Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes partly give the game away in their quote of the Lacanian mirror scene from Cocteau’s ORPHEUS. Any dissatisfaction with QUEER, then, is not to debated—you don’t have to admire it as much as I do—but it can be instructive. The aesthetic narcotic of film is closer in nature to Lee’s drug abuse than to his obsession with Allerton, and QUEER plays expertly with these categories of addiction and their effect on potential growth. What’s more satisfying in the end—the lover who never says no, or the one who says no most of the time, or in the most significant ways, but succumbs just when one has given up all hope? We can’t help but want that oppositional tension, and so endure the self-degradations of asymmetrical desire.
This is in part why Guadagnino and Kuritzkes don’t give us the movie we want. Cinema in isolation does not deliver connection and transcendence any more than heroin does. But it’s a path through the jungle of meaninglessness. It’s the open door through which we gaze upon what’s possible and, beyond that, and as elusive as it may be, what’s possibly possible.
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