Luca Guadagnino and Drew Starkey interview: On visualising an ayahuasca trip and the compression and repression of desire in ‘Queer’

Luca Guadagnino's Queer is a film about longing and alienation, exploring profound love and unsynchronised connections in a humid, dislocated Mexico City.

Luca Guadagnino has built a career on the kind of smouldering, aching desire that often self-destructs in the hands of beautiful people. So when he announced Queer, an adaptation of William S Burroughs’ long-unpublished semi-autobiographical novel, it was almost too perfect: a film about longing and alienation, lensed by a director who understands that unfulfilled desire is more potent than anything consummated. The film, much like Burroughs’ prose, exists in the liminal space between longing and despair, between possession and loss.

Queer has been, well, divisive. It arrived at Venice trailing a haze of anticipation and scepticism, with critics either swooning over its fevered mood or rolling their eyes at its indulgences. For a filmmaker who luxuriates in style, Guadagnino steeps Queer in humid, woozy dislocation. The film unspools in a Mexico City of perpetual twilight, where lead star Daniel Craig pines after a younger and alluringly aloof Drew Starkey with the sort of doomed fixation that turns men into ghosts.

There’s a burning fervour to how Guadagnino’s writing translates desire into cinema — whether it be the sun-drenched sensuality of Call Me by Your Name, the feverish paranoia of Suspiria, or even the sweaty techno pangs of Challengers— which sees Queer as an exploration of connection rather than as a study in obsession.

“I respectfully and honestly do not believe this is a movie about a destructive obsession for someone,” Guadagnino says. “Neither is it an unrequited love story. I think this is a love story of profound love. Not a profound love story, but profound love itself.”

The distinction is important to him. For the Italian auteur, the film isn’t a portrait of infatuation driving a man to ruin, but of two people caught in a gravitational pull they cannot fully comprehend. Played with a throbbing vulnerability by Craig, Lee is an expatriate adrift in 1950s Mexico City, numbing himself with alcohol, sex and heroin, until he meets Eugene Allerton, the young GI played by Starkey. Their relationship is fraught, sometimes tender, often distant — Allerton’s affections are inscrutable at best, evasive at worst. Theirs is a connection dictated by misalignment, not lack of feeling.

“If you pay attention, the first time we see Allerton, he is looking at Lee,” Guadagnino explains. “Lee falls in love with Allerton because Allerton is interested in him. It is not about Lee objectifying this character and wanting him so badly that he’s going to go places that will make him suffer.” He pauses, then adds, “I don’t like stalkers.”

For Starkey, the challenge of playing Allerton lay in embodying a character who is, by design, unknowable.