On Blu-ray - David Hare welcomes two films 'bookmarking a period of personal expression in movies' - LAST TANGO IN PARIS (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) & QUEER (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)

These two just arrived from the UK and USA. (Nina and the back scratcher are permanent fixtures.)

Happily, both 4K UHD discs are outstanding. Mubi, Queer’s producer created its own 4K disc transfer and the result upstages even theatrical viewing. Mubi includes a region A locked Blu-ray which I haven’t yet spun but perhaps unfortunately neither Blu-ray nor 4K includes extras, like the copious material included on A24’s UK Blu-ray only disc. There’s also an Oz Blu-ray Region B released by Madman, also not viewed by me which appears also to be extras free. 

Needless to say I thought Queer was the best film of 2024 and it’s completely swung me around from disdain for Luca Guadagnino's cinema to uncontained admiration for his passionate expression of everything that makes us queer. From style, emotion, humor, lust and unrestrained lyricism, i salute it.

The Bertolucci too remains a masterpiece to me, one of his best. Made when he was young and energetic enough to give reign to so much emotion - fear, angst, desire - in such formally gorgeous mise-en-scène. This is a new 4K scan and restoration for Vinegar Syndrome label, with supervision by Rotunno who is probably responsible for the unusually warm color tone of the actors, shots and settings. I had a look at the now ancient MGM Blu-ray from ca. 2009 before ordering this and I have to say that disc remains an extremely strong, highly resolved transfer. But Rotunno’s little dial spin with the color grading won me over after twenty minutes. He’s commented about this element here and there and, given at least he hasn’t meddled with the aspect ration (it remains 1.85) I happily buy this new rendering.

Indeed both films, now fifty plus years apart have so much context and history and expression and formal lyricism, it feels as though the two pictures are bookmarking a period of personal expression in movies that now seems so starkly absent from so much cinema, whether arthouse or popular or both.

Vale Berto and grazie Guadagnino.

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.