WARNING: this review is deeply personal, politically incorrect, and rudely honest. If you’re looking for a polished critique, best look elsewhere. But if you're after a raw human connection, this way, please.
When the lights came up in my small-town cinema, at the 9pm screening, the only one in the original language, I felt an overwhelming sense of protection. I had just watched Queer, with my ex, no less. We’d somehow managed to share a moment together, even without speaking. Without hurling those words at each other which, lately, had become so incomprehensible they could only wound, again and again.
A great sense of protection, yes. For what I’d just seen, and for what had just happened. Both outside of me and within. I thought about the critiques, the reviews, the opinions of my friends living abroad, and in that very moment I decided to ignore them all. To not give a fuck about cultural debates, about having to share my take, about having to pick a side. I don’t give a shit. Because this film mattered. To me. Right now. It’s a film that retraces, with the blind obsessive fatigue of someone who cannot help it, desire, longing, addiction.
Addiction to substances. Addiction to people.
Guess which one’s worse.
And I, who’ve so often felt like a stray, desperately looking for someone, something, that might feed me, or at least stroke my hair, saw myself in it. Exposed, like those “ectoplasmic hands” which I later found out Guadagnino lifted straight from Burroughs’ own writing.
Jolly good fella, if you’ve never heard of him.
Son of a wealthy family, turned his back on it all and was cast out in return for being queer, different, deviant. He shot his wife. By accident. But he did it. And he later said that if it weren’t for that tragedy, he would’ve never become a writer. Writing is a plunge into the abyss. To do it, you’ve got to jump into a dark well whose bottom you can’t see. And maybe that stray bullet is what pushed him in.
Queer is a film for those who can bear uncertainty. For those willing to understand that, sometimes, there’s no answer. For those who know the dull ache of not being able to touch something. For the ones who, when they wake in the morning, always need a moment before they can breathe.
Don’t go see it if what you care about is how things end.
Because Queer doesn’t end anywhere.
It asks where we end up. Where desire goes once even the last hope has vanished.
Queer is a body that dresses elegantly to hide a wound.
A change that moves at the pace of tropical condensation.
That lets itself be passed through like insomnia or illness.
And I will never forget the tragic emotion I felt
When Lee, Daniel Craig, bows before the object of his desire
And then, seized by awkward embarrassment, realises he’s made a fool of himself.
When you lay bare your most precious treasures
And realise the other person doesn’t even reject you
They’re just entirely indifferent.
When you’ve placed all your organs on the table
And your lover says nothing.
You’re not even sure they saw them.
So what remains, then?
What do you do, then
That’s death, right there, inside life.
And no drug on earth could bring you back from that
Or even kill you properly.
Thank you to this film for being different
Without trying to explain it.
