QUEER (A24 – TBD): Luca Guadagnino has unearthed glamour in the blood-soaked dance troupe/witches’ coven of Suspiria and the cannibal romance of Bones and All, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that his seedy 1950s Mexico City and South America of Queer glistens with swank. Queer is based (by Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote Guadagnino’s Challengers) on a semi-autobiographical novella by William S. Burroughs, which was written contemporaneously with its setting but not published until 1985. In it, the Burroughs surrogate character William Lee (Daniel Craig), an American heroin addict with family money who purports to be a writer, hangs around the gay and bicurious community of Mexico City, indolent and perpetually watchful. After a while, his gaze is mostly trained on Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a younger man who spends much of his time in cafes with a female sex worker but whose own sexuality is tantalizingly unfixed, even when he casually starts sleeping with Lee. The writer is fascinated and then obsessed with a not-quite-requited love. Lee becomes determined to track down a hallucinatory drug called yage, aka ayahuasca, which he believes imparts telepathic powers, and in the second half of Queer he leads Eugene on a journey to South America to find it. That part of the film becomes enervated and surreal in a way that can make you lose your patience with Guadagnino, all of it culminating in an epilogue that insists on tying Lee too closely to the biographical Burroughs. Until it succumbs to self-indulgent fantasia, though, Queer is a pungent, witty recounting of a small, self-aware expatriate community, anchored by the strong presences of Craig and Starkey. The photography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is heavy with heat and desire, there’s gorgeously stylized production design by Stefano Baisi, and a typically intense score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (interspersed with deliberately anachronistic musical cues). Queer doesn’t quite work all the way through, but it has more than a few memorable moments.
JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE (Sony Classics – TBD): Laura Piani’s film doesn’t live up to its English-language title. It’s a likable but rather wan rom-com about Agathe (Camille Rutherford), a singleton who works in the Paris branch of the Shakespeare & Co bookstore and and dreams of being a novelist, while finding herself blocked both professionally and romantically, with a BFF Felix (Pablo Pauly) who’s always been platonic but maybe doesn’t have to be. Agathe’s life moves into a higher gear when she’s entered for a writer’s residency at the British manor home of a Jane Austen descendent, and has to start dealing with her apprehensions (she can’t even ride in a car due to past trauma) to get there. Once in England, she llmost immediately meets Oliver (Charlie Anson), who’s handsome yet arrogant in a familiar way. Piani’s script goes just about exactly where you’d expect, and although rom-coms as a rule aren’t marvels of surprise, Jane Austen lacks the kind of insight and charisma that can make the genre click. It’s oddly like a Hallmark movie with subtitles and a bit more sex, warmhearted yet never captivating.
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