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Referenced in Close-Up: Why do We Need the Venice Film Festival?
Scenario
Lee, who recounts his life in Mexico City among American expatriate college students and bar owners surviving on part-time jobs and GI Bill benefits. He is driven to pursue a young man named Allerton, who is based on Adelbert Lewis Marker.. IMDb Editor Arno Kazarian offers up quick takes on 12 movies he screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival, including Anora and the dangerous, curiously erotic Misericordia .. Luca Guadagnino stated in an interview that Queer is a project he’s wanted to make since he was 20.. (2024).
He is played, superbly, by Daniel Craig
QUEER has strong echoes of the same director’s CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. The central character in both films is unambiguously gay, while the object of his desire is more difficult to pin down. As in the earlier film, we’re not in America, but we are among Americans.However, whereas the protagonist in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME was a sexually-pulsating adolescent, here our focus is a middle-aged writer, addicted to drugs and alcohol. The first part of QUEER involves a will-they?/won’t-they as Craig’s character William Lee longs for/lusts after fresh-faced ex-soldier Eugene Allerton, played, superbly, by Drew Starkey. With excellent support from Jason Schwartzman and.
The writing (Justin Kuritzkes, based on William S
Drew Droege, playing other denizens of the local cafes and bars, the film maintains a steady pace. Burrough’s book) and directing are as assured as expected.But the film kicks into another gear in its final third, when Lee and Allerton go on a field trip to find a plant that Lee understands might free the human capacity for telepathy. This unlikely adventure eventually results in an encounter with a certain Dr Cotter, whom they find deep in the jungle carrying out research. Dr Cotter is played, in an amazing performance, by the great Lesley Manville, unrecognizable at first, so complete is her transformation. It’s fascinating that even a fine actor like Daniel Craig is, unfortunately, somewhat diminished by a great actor like Manville in a part that shows her to maximum advantage.
She’s simply magnificent
She’s not doing anything other than her job. Give that woman an Oscar, please.QUEER is made with great care, has many remarkable sequences, and is interestingly indebted, as Guardagnino has stated himself, to the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It’s a film about a deep desire to make contact, even to the extent of fusing, with another human being. In that sense, again like the best of Powell and Pressburger it’s massively romantic. For some, it might feel excessively so.
It’s worth seeing
For me, the difference between, say, BLACK NARCISSUS or A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH and this film, is that I came away having merely watched QUEER rather than having been swept away by it as I was by CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, which is, I admit, a lesser movie. Go see QUEER, though. Check out our list of exciting new movies from this year’s film festivals, including Venice, TIFF, the New York Film Festival, and more.