The Current Cinema - David Hare's nostalgia bells get rung by QUEER (Luca Guadagnino, Italy, 2024)

I revisited last night these tattered remnants of my youth (bought way back in my palmy days of hustling, acid trips and “moral” abandon in 1968.) Back then William Burroughs felt like an endorsement, the smart older brother we never had to simply scorn the establishment, all the while shouting from the barricades “eat shit motherfuckers.” Being queer then was another proud crime and adjunctive slap in the face to bourgeois society.

Now, nearly sixty years later the western world seems to be strangling itself again in large part thanks to cannibilistic capitalism, egocentricity and transactionalism. All sugar coated with the cancer of PC and university minted degrees on things like film and gender studies, in the process draining those noble realities into garbage salaries for deeply unworthy New Economy Tertiary “learning” with their bloodless, intellectually zombified “curricula” ” and their completely worthless “degrees”

Which is all a roundabout way of getting to the point. After dodging every Guadagnino film since Call Me By Your Name which turned me avidly against this auteur of swoondom, I finally succumbed to. his new film, Queer.

I am in shock at its ability to completely capture me and take me back to places I hadn’t revisited since I was very, very young.

Let me just get this out there. The players in this literally gorgeous movie are all so wonderful they seem to have been waiting a lifetime to get their parts. Even my beloved Lesley Manville, here unrecognizable as the Jungle Botanist-Witch who feeds the boys Telepathy enabling Yage. 

David Hare's copy

Every step up the scale of stylization that Guadagnino lays onto the visual fabric just multiplies the pleasure - the 50s linen suits, the unbelievable goofy but beautiful miniature bi-plane flying wobbly on wires against a painted cartoon sky. From the entirely Cinecittã soundstage where they rebuilt a 1951 Mexico City and a Guatamalan jungle in lurid sea green and rattlesnake copper. To the final staggering trip sequence in which, unlike Burroughs’ novel, Lee and Eugene do in fact find Yage and imbibe its powers. The epilogue which sublimely and achingly recreates the endgame of Kubrick’s 2001, set to Reznor and Ross’ Vaster than Empires it may be the greatest “death scene” I’ve seen in movies.

I’m old now and I hate what the world’s become. This movie and its incredible passion made me young again, it brought me back real joy, real pleasure, real excitement. It’s so alive with outrageous taste and feeling you seem to apprehend the excitement of all the players, whose sheer immersion in their parts has turned them on too.