Luca Guadagnino

QUEER: forty-five minutes of fine romantic drama, and then the bizarre

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Photo caption: Daniel Craig in QUEER. Courtesy of A24.

The first thing I need to tell you about Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is something that I knew beforehand but failed to internalize – it is based on a William S. Burroughs story, an autobiographical one at that. Had I been thinking about that, I wouldn’t have been so jarred when the film veered into the super trippy.

Queer starts off coloring within the lines of a character study and romantic drama. William Lee (Daniel Craig) is an American expat in 1950s Mexico City; a man of independent means, he is continually drinking and prowling for sex with younger men. He glimpses Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a gorgeous American of ambiguous sexuality and is instantly infatuated; Lee begins a pursuit, and Eugene is hard to get, until he isn’t.

That’s the first act, which absorbed me. But it didn’t prepare me for the turgid second act, which is about opiate addiction nor the third act, which is about a search for psychedelics. That third act is bizarre, with some ripping moments.

Luca Guadagnino is known for visually striking, even delectable, movies; he and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (also Call Me By Your Name and Challengers) oblige with plenty of Mexico City and Ecuadorian jungle eye candy, mostly shot in an Italian studio. There’s an especially wonderful dream sequence after Lee’s most extreme drunk night. This is the first Guadagnino movie I’ve seen with special effects, which are necessary in the hallucinatory third act.

But Queer is too long overall, especially the hallucination scene. The entire second act drags.

Daniel Craig’s acting ability was justifiably admired before he became such an iconic James Bond. Here, his Lee is so fascinated and yet mystified by Eugene. Lee is always off-balance when he can win Eugene’s company, but he can’t control him. Lee has attained a relationship, but it’s an asymmetric one.

If there’s any doubt that he is very comfortable putting James Bond behind him, that doubt is erased when we see Daniel Craig playing a character with semen glistening on his lips.

Craig also plays drunk very well – which many actors fail to do convincingly. He nails the various degrees, starting at the point where Lee fails to read the room correctly and acts cutesy when it isn’t funny. As Lee becomes more tipsy, Craig perfectly adds a slight sway to his gait, then a bigger one.

We have known Craig can act since The Mother (2003) and Layer Cake (2004), so Drew Starkey, who hadn’t yet had a memorable performance, is the real discovery here. Eugene is anything but demonstrative, and Starkey communicates all of Eugene’s interest in Lee and resistance to Lee, with his eyes and body.

Lesley Manville jumps off the screen in what must be the most bizarre portrayal in her storied career; at some point, she must have played one of the witches from Macbeth, but she looks more the part here, with greasy hair, darkened teeth and unhinged eyes, than she could have in any other production. Her performance is very, very strong.

Jason Schwartzman, playing one of Lee’s Mexico City expat buddies, is very funny every time he’s on the screen.

So, what do I think about Queer? Luca Guadagnino and his team are interesting and accomplished artists, Daniel Craig is an actor worthy of his stardom and it’s great to have a non-heterosexual romantic drama – BUT, the choice to hew so closely to Burroughs’ source material, along with some self-indulgent editing, condemns the second half of Queer to lose the audience (me, at least).

CHALLENGERS: three people and their desire

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Photo caption: Bill Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

Challengers is an absorbing and entertaining set of character studies, wrapped in a love triangle and set in the world of tennis.  Anything but a conventional sports movie, Challengers is remarkably insightful about what it takes to be successful in any competitive endeavor. Director Luca Guadagnino tells his story of three people over 13 years, flashing back and forth between their encounters in the present and roughly 8, 11, 12 and 13 years before.

When we first meet Tashi (Zendaya), she is a juniors champion about to dominate collegiate tennis and already a celebrity; she is clearly headed for Tiger Woods/Michael Jordan territory, where she will be the headliner whenever she competes and her endorsement revenue will dwarf her winnings.  Tashi is highly intelligent, beautiful, driven and confident, and, as a teen, is already an astute and clear eyed observer of human character.

Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Bill Faist) are, as most teen boys, much simpler.  They are classmates and besties.  Their tennis is not in Tashi’s stratosphere, but they are good enough to contend for the U.S. juniors doubles championship, and to realistically aspire to pro careers.

As tennis players, Patrick and Art are very equally matched.  But, then there is the matter of testosterone – too much (Patrick) and perhaps not enough (Art). 

Patrick has swagger – sometimes that of a charming rogue and sometimes that of a boor or bully.  There’s a saying in sports that is usually applied to baseball pitchers and football quarterbacks – “He has a million dollar arm and a ten cent head“.  That describes Patrick, who is too undisciplined to keep his temper in check and who has too much misplaced pride to accept coaching.

Art, on the other hand, is so  fundamentally decent that we wonder where his ambition comes from.  (Hint: it’s not from within Art himself.)

That’s what we come to learn about the three characters.  One of the keys to Challengers is when each character figures out the other two.  Tashi takes the measure of Patrick and Art with breathtaking rapidity.  Patrick and Art come to understand the others, but much later and at different times.  When the last light switch is toggled on, there’s an explosion.

Guadagnino’s previous three films (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me by My Name) form what we calls his Desire Trilogy, and all three abound in sensual desire.  Challengers could have been titled Desire, in the sense that competitive success pivots on who has the most desire, who wants it more than their peers, who has enough drive to fuel the grueling training and who has the killer instinct in competition.

Guadagnino is known for sensual films, set in beautiful places (a palazzo-like house in Milan, a glorious Mediterranean island and the Northern Italian countryside) and with abundant, tantalizing gourmet food. In contrast, Challengers takes place in hotel and motel rooms, tennis courts and locker rooms and the moment closest to food porn involves churros in a Stanford campus cafe. Guadagnino focuses the sensuality on the tennis scenes and the closeups of his actors as they hunger for victory or for sex.

There’s a constant undercurrent of lust, but calling Challengers primarily a love triangle would be too pat. It’s just such a rich depiction of the strengths and weaknesses of the characters, their respective vulnerability to manipulation and their relative levels of ambition.

Zendaya in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

One key to the story in Challengers is when the characters figure each other out. One takes the measure of the other two immediately; each of the other two finally get the others, but at different times.

Challengers is superbly acted. Zendaya’s performance is a revelation, both in the way she hides Tashi’s thoughts from the guys and in her remarkable physicality. Guadagnino uses closeups and quick cutting to make Faist and O-Connor look like they’re playing high level tennis. Zendaya, ripping the ball in long shots, looks like she is ready for the U.S. Open.

Josh O’Connor – the feckless marriage-age Prince Charles in The Crown and the surly protagonist of La Chimera  (by another Italian filmmaker, Alice Rohrwacher) – finally gets to play a character with joie de vivre, and he’s excellent.

Bill Faist in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

I hadn’t seen Bill Faist (West Side Story) before, and his performance in Challengers is often the most interesting. Affable, malleable and conflict-avoidant, the young Art knows when unrequited love is causing his unhappiness. But then, he’s also unhappy when he seems to have it all, and he doesn’t understand why.

Challengers is a wonderful two-hours-and-eleven minutes movie, but I think that there’s an even better one-hour-and-fifty-five minute movie inside; Guadagnino invests too much time in the final confrontation, drawing it out with plenty of slow-motion and house music. Still, this is one of the best films of 2024.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME: first love in a luscious Italian summer

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Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

Call Me by Your Name is an extraordinarily beautiful story of sexual awakening set in a luscious Italian summer.  The film is gorgeous and magnificently well-acted, but flawed.

Each year, the family of 16-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) spends the summer in a villa in Northern Italy.  Elio’s father is an American professor of ancient Greek and Roman culture, and each summer he invites a different grad student to live in their villa and work on scholarly pursuits.  In this summer of 1981, that lucky grad student is the 26-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer).  Elio is attracted to Oliver, who is a closeted gay man. Oliver is attracted to Elio, but initially resists Elio’s overtures.  What follows between the two of them is an enthralling and authentic exploration of first love.

Timothée Chalamet is really perfect as Elio, a musical prodigy who is beating off the girls with a stick.  Even really handsome and talented 17-year-olds have some awkwardness, especially while they’re trying too hard to be cool.  Chamalet captures that perfectly, along with the obsessive longing of a first romance.  (Chalamet is also in Lady Bird, where he plays the dreamy kid who plays in a band, the object of Lady Bird’s desire.)  Armie Hammer is also superb as the more worldly Oliver, whose external confidence masks inner conflicts.

Timothée Chalamet in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

The story of the two main characters would have made a perfect film, but famed screenwriter James Ivory adds some distracting implausibility with the other characters.  First, there are Elio’s impossibly cool and understanding parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) who practically push their teen son into the arms of an older man; nobody has parents like that, especially TWO of them.  (And, yes, I did understand the dad’s motivation, made almost explicit in his final monologue).  Second, Elio hurts the feelings of a girl (in a way that almost every male has hurt some girl).  Later, she forgives him and it’s all made to be okay.  This is just too convenient for Elio, and I didn’t buy it.

And then there’s one of my own movie pet peeves.  I generally despise musical interludes in movies, when the dialogue is suspended and a song is played over a montage of imagery.  This usually indicates a lack of imagination in the story-telling.  A movie gets negative bonus points from me when the music is an insipid pop ballad.  In Call Me by Your Name, there are two such Euro-pop interludes.

On the other hand, the depiction of the Italian countryside, with its rustling breezes, orchards heavy with fruit, ancient buildings and  is pure travel porn.  I think that The Wife would have walked out of Call Me by Your Name – not because she wouldn’t have liked it – but to make reservations for a return to Tuscany.  Director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, I Am Love) has a gift for making his native Italy unbearably attractive on the screen.  Between the work of Guadagnino and Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), Italy has been well-celebrated in recent films.

Call Me By Your Name is a very good movie, and the core story of Elio and Oliver is great cinema.

A BIGGER SPLASH: another exercise in sensuality

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Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton in A BIGGER SPLASH
Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton in A BIGGER SPLASH

Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) is the kind of guy who gives a bad name to joie de vivre.  The ultimate disrupter, his gift is to seize all the attention, change any social situation into a party and take everyone else out of their comfort zones.  In A Bigger Splash, he inflicts himself on his former rock star lover Marianne (Tilda Swinton), who is trying to enjoy a quiet romantic respite with her current lover Paul (Matthias Shoenaerts) on the secluded Italian island of Pantelleria. Enter Harry, exit solitude.

With only five minutes notice, Harry shows up, expecting to become a houseguest in Marianne and Paul’s  borrowed villa.  To make matters worse, Harry brings along his newly discovered daughter (Dakota Johnson), a highly sexual nymphet with eyes for Paul.  And, and the first day, he invites two of his other friends to join them.  Harry repeatedly tears off his clothes, starts everyone dancing (one of his dances is right up there in cinema history with the one in Napoleon Dynamite) and even turns a village cafe into an overflowing karaoke after-party.  Because Marianne is recuperating from vocal cord surgery, she can’t talk, which makes Harry’s social intrusions even more unbearable.

Harry’s antics are very entertaining, and we watch with apprehension for the other shoe to drop – when are the others going to explode in reaction?   Harry is also trying to insinuate himself back into Marianne’s bed, an intention apparent to the hunky/dreamy Paul, for whom still waters run deep.

This is Guadagnino’s first English language movie.  He had a recent US art house hit with I Am Love, (also starring Swinton).  I Am Love was notorious for its food porn, and there are tantalizing scenes in A Bigger Splash, too, with homemade fresh ricotta and a spectacular outdoor restaurant set amid hillside ruins.

Guadagnino’s greatest gift may be the sensuality of his films.  Whether it’s food, a place or a social situation, he makes the audience feel like we’re experiencing it right along with the character.  In A Bigger Splash, we start out as tourists in a hideout for the super rich, and then Guadagnino takes to us through a raucous comedy of manners to, finally, a suspense thriller.