La Presse at the 81st Venice Film Festival | Burroughs, William S. Burroughs

Competing for the Golden Lion and the Queer Lion, Queerby Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, based on the novel by William S. Burroughs, stars British actor Daniel Craig as a gay American writer living in Mexico City who wants to discover the powers of ayahuasca.

(Venice) At 17, Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria) reads a novel that will “change him forever,” Queerby William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), a prominent figure of the Beat Generation with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

“I was touched by the age difference between the two characters and by the fact that one did not judge the other and vice versa. Queer “talks about who we are when we are alone and feel like we have been abandoned,” said the Italian filmmaker, who had long dreamed of bringing Queer on screen, at a press conference at the Venice Film Festival.

“We were already working on Challengers when Luca gave me a copy of the book, continued the American screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. He asked me if I would like to adapt it; I read it that same evening and said yes straight away, even though I didn’t really know how I was going to do it. Fortunately, I was familiar with the world of William S. Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch [adapté au cinéma par David Cronenberg]. I was surprised by the linear love story he tells in Queer. So I focused on this story and on the author’s universe so that the scenario would hold together.”

Set in Mexico City in the early 1950s, filmed entirely in the legendary Cinecittà studios, and driven by the music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Queer stars Daniel Craig as an American writer, William Lee, who recounts his youthful memories to expatriate students and ex-army soldiers, while scouring gay bars. At the Ship Ahoy, Lee regularly crosses paths with Frank (Jason Schwartzman), who is always falling for lovers who strip him of his possessions, and Dume (Drew Droege), a flamboyant homosexual.

“I watched a lot of interviews with William S. Burroughs,” said the five-time James Bond actor. “He had a deep, measured voice, but I wanted to find the other William S. Burroughs because I had read Junkiewhich is very arid, whereas Queer, which speaks of love, mourning and solitude, contains a lot of emotion.

One day, Lee meets the gaze of young Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, from the series Outerbanks) and becomes completely obsessed with it. Although Allerton, who is seeing a young woman, initially rejects Lee’s advances, the two soon begin a torrid affair, all the while consuming alcohol and hard drugs in abundance.

“There’s nothing intimate about shooting sex scenes,” said Daniel Craig, who had long dreamed of working with Luca Guadagnino. “These scenes are choreographies that we were able to rehearse for several months before shooting, which was the best way to break the ice between Drew and me. We laughed a lot and had fun, but what we wanted was for it to be natural.”

“The best way to meet someone is to roll around on the floor with them,” added Drew Starkey. “The rehearsals not only helped us with the intimate scenes, but also to open up about the characters, the love story that they live. I’m not a dancer and Daniel is even less than me, but we learned to dance together.”

Having heard about a hallucinogenic plant that allows telepathic communication, Lee contacts Dr. Hernández (Andrés Duprat), who puts him on the trail of Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), a botanist hiding in the jungle to conduct research on the virtues of the plant. With Allerton, Lee will set out to find this mysterious concoction called yagé, better known as ayahuasca.

“I’ve never taken ayahuasca, but I’ve watched people when they’re under its influence,” the English actress confided. “It’s hard to talk about the filming of these scenes if you want to keep them a mystery. What really helped in building the character were Jonathan Anderson’s costumes, as well as the hair and makeup.”

Marked by the imagination of British cinema, citing Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), both by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, as inspiration, Luca Guadagnino certainly signs his most audacious film. In a scene that seems to come straight out of a Dali painting or a Man Ray photograph, he evokes the tragic end of Joan (Ronia Ava), wife of Lee/Burroughs, and refers to it later in another hallucinatory sequence.

Benefiting from a deliberately anachronistic soundtrack (we can hear All Apologiesby Nirvana, covered by Sinéad O’Connor, and the original version of Come As You Arefrom the same group), Queer accumulates surreal moments to culminate in a final sequence evoking that of 2001: A Space Odysseyby Stanley Kubrick.

“We took some liberties with the book; we even make several references to other books,” Luca Guadagnino revealed. “In the novel, Cotter is a man and they don’t take ayahuasca because there is an element of modesty in Burroughs’ way of telling the story. However, in his diary, three days before his death, Burroughs wrote: ‘Our love will grow faster than an empire’; one of the songs in Trent and Atticus is inspired by it. For Justin and me, Lee and Allerton had to try ayahuasca. Finally, I wanted to make a Burroughsian film by asking myself: what if Burroughs had made a film?”