This mesmerising film stars Daniel Craig and explores sex as a tender, emotive antidote to gay shame and the vital, life-affirming power of sensuality.

WORDS PATRICK SPROULL
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To Luca Guadaganino, the Italian filmmaker and Hollywood’s guiding light on sensual cinema, nothing is ever as it seems. In a cinema landscape starved of eroticism, Guadaganino’s nuanced, granular approach to sex has been a balm. The world of Guadagnino contains invigorating contradictions: cannibalism is romantic, tennis is more than a sport, and, of course, a peach is not just a peach. This playful blurring of what constitutes sex throughout his career makes the (literally) naked intimacy of his newest film, Queer, all the more powerful. It feels like the culmination of something the director has been working towards for years. 

What makes Queer so affecting is that its source material, the William S. Burroughs novella, is anything but. Burroughs’ lead, Lee, a veteran in 1950s Mexico City who subsists on a diet of double tequilas and twinks, is a pitiable figure. He’s unpleasant to be around and decrepit in appearance, yearning pathetically for the attention of anyone around: “An addict has little regard for his image,” wrote Burroughs. But when we meet Guadagnino’s version of Lee, superbly played by Daniel Craig, he is a far cry from tragic; cutting a sharp figure in his white linen suit, one hand in his pocket, Panama hat doffed to passers-by, he is something of an elegant raconteur. 

The novella is semi-autobiographical and semi-complete, written in Mexico when Burroughs fled the USA after being caught in possession of drugs and firearms, and you get the sense that the author, so close to the text, has given up on Lee. Guadagnino, on the other hand, has very much not. Craig’s Lee is a man vibrating with squandered potential, and Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes give him considerable grace, sketching him with more light and shade than Burroughs did. Lee here has frittered his life away on years of military service and a crippling heroin addiction. He spends his days waxing lyrical in bars to a coterie of drinking buddies, performing a more refined form of masculinity than his literary counterpart.

Then Eugene Allerton enters Lee’s life. Guadagnino has him enter in slow motion, foregrounded by a cockfight and soundtracked to Nirvana’s “Come as You Are”; it’s an introduction that takes your breath away. In Burroughs’ novella, Allerton could be indistinguishable from any of Lee’s previous pick-ups, but brought to life by Drew Starkey, he is one of Guadagnino’s greatest figures of attraction; maybe the definitive. Where Lee in the novella is lecherous and driven by heroin-induced libido, Craig’s Lee is genuinely besotted and magnetised by Allerton. He becomes a lovesick young man in that moment, and though we never quite understand what makes Allerton tick, what makes him reciprocate Lee’s attraction, it almost doesn’t matter. What distinguishes Allerton and Lee’s relationship from previous Guadagnino trysts is how willingly the filmmaker, after so long, embraces carnality. 

The sex in Queer comes thick and fast; they are, as Guadagnino put it, “numerous and quite scandalous”. Much has already been made of the nudity and the sweaty, transgressive kick of seeing men fucking; witnessing gay sex handled this authentically and erotically feels like a breakthrough. It is, in some ways, Guadagnino’s horniest film, but in true Luca Guadagnino form, it is a precise, considered horniness. The sex in Queer – Lee’s pursuit and domination of Allerton – feels like the release of years of tension in the director’s filmmaking. When Allerton, reclined on a bed, allows Lee to go down on him, Guadagnino splices the scene with shots of the Mexico City nightscape through every window in the apartment. It playfully recalls Call Me by Your Name’s infamous pan out of the window from Elio and Oliver when they finally fuck. Guadagnino made this decision because, in his words, bearing witness to that scene would have been an “unkind intrusion”; in Queer, Guadagnino’s camera is empathetic and necessary. For once, he allows us to stay in the room. 

Lee’s euphoria, his unabashed horniness for Allerton, is the heart of Queer; the sex is its lungs. Lee is a soul filled with self-loathing, hollowed out by a lifetime of repression, and with Allerton, he begins to slowly colour in the blanks. It’s a testament to Craig’s performance that Lee feels quite so achingly real, an intensely troubled man isolated from himself and others by his queerness. Finding pleasure in Allerton is the light at the end of the tunnel and for Guadagnino, who has always been choosy over whether to consummate his characters’ relationships, it is a startling change of pace. 

Earlier this year, in Guadagnino’s kinetic, uber-hot tennis drama, he took a very different approach. “The tennis is the sex,” said star Josh O’Connor. You’d struggle to find anyone who disagrees. The love triangle at its core – consisting of O’Connor, Mike Faist, and Zendaya – thrashed it out on the court instead of the bedroom. Guadagnino’s constant blueballing of the audience, teasing and never delivering in the conventional sense, was Challengers’ real grand slam. Frustrating as it was, there was no world in which Challengers could be explicit. 

It was the same for Bones and All, Guadagnino’s 2022 romance about two cannibals who fall in love. Sex was never shown and cannibalism took its place; in Bones and All, resisting and eventually consuming a loved one was the greatest act of intimacy. Again, Guadagnino lensed his characters’ physical attraction through something other than explicit sex. Even in his 2009 film I Am Love, the sex scenes are shown but mostly in tasteful close-up – lips pressed against skin, a mouth open in pleasure, a hand gripping a scalp. Sex becomes a jigsaw to put together. 

This all makes Queer’s sensual, complete portrait of lust hit like a wave. Guadagnino has always been a master of portraying love, capable of negotiating the balance between sex and romance. By finally portraying gay sex in Queer, so generously and so fondly, he is giving the act layers upon layers of meaning. It is the height of a career dedicated to portraying sex as erotically and authentically as possible. As Lee throws himself body and soul into his lust for Allerton, so, too, does Luca Guadagnino. 

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Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Strange Way of Life’ has just landed on MUBI as part of their Neo-Westerns: A New Frontier series. 

Words Patrick Sproull

In the early 2000s Pedro Almodóvar turned down the opportunity to direct Brokeback Mountain, the groundbreaking gay romance starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. 20 years later the Spanish filmmaker has returned to present what he describes as his “answer” to Brokeback Mountain, with the sexy, passionate Strange Way of Life – now streaming on MUBI as part of their new season, Neo-Westerns: A New Frontier. 

In its golden age, the Western was a genre dominated by men. Male characters were often portrayed as lonely nomads, taciturn cowboys skulking around the fringes of society. Women were confined to saloons or wife roles. People of colour were virtually nonexistent. Any trace of queerness was always implicit, the smallest crumbs being moments like Red River’s Montgomery Clift and John Ireland comparing the size of their, uh, pistols. In this era, the idea of ‘lawlessness’ has often dominated cultural depictions of the ‘Wild’ West – that it was all exhilarating gunfights and freewheeling debauchery – but this obscures the period’s colonial foundations of respectable society versus so-called ‘savagery’.

What’s always been so alluring about the Western is that it is both deeply recognisable yet completely alien. The baked-in social attitudes towards women, LGBTQIA+ folks and people of colour are tiringly familiar but the barren, unforgiving landscape of cacti, gullies, shootouts and cattle ranches feels like the stuff of kid’s fiction. Yet that desolate space has always offered an incredible canvas for filmmakers to make their mark and reinvent the genre as we know it.

With Strange Way of Life, his second English-language short film, Pedro Almodóvar is the latest director to challenge the dusty traditions of the Western genre. Here, one of the most celebrated gay filmmakers working today has taken all the familiar iconography of the genre – the lone horse-riding cowboy, the sheriff, the saloon, the climactic gunfight – and injected them with his uniquely Almodóvarian queer sensibility. Boasting two extremely handsome leads in Ethan Hawke and Internet sweetheart Pedro Pascal, Almodóvar has made a Western for 2023, from Saint Laurent’s equally handsome, meticulously crafted costuming, to the smallest details, like a landscape painting by feminist artist Georgia O’Keeffe hanging above Silva’s bed or a brief cameo by fashion darling and Elite star Manu Rios. This is a fresh kind of Western, joining a host of similarly daring new takes on the genre on MUBI. 

The queerness laced through Strange Way of Life is simply one way of modernising the Western, as MUBI have collated a collection of bold, revolutionary neo-Westerns that upend the genre as we know it and imagine other pasts and futures for it. But the Western is a genre that has always undergone significant change. The era of the Old West was quite literally a period of extraordinary national, social and economic upheaval. ‘Neo-Westerns: A New Frontier’ explores the ways in which filmmakers from around the globe have shifted the Western to more contemporary settings, showing what happens when the genre’s baked-in hierarchies are disrupted by modernity.

Neo-Westerns show that, among other things, the genre isn’t strictly confined to America – it’s expanded all around the world. In Valeska Grisebach’s knowingly-titled Western, the Bulgarian countryside becomes as dangerous and volatile as Arizona and New Mexico as a feud builds between local villagers and invading workmen. Grisebach extracts the essential tension at the heart of the Western and transposes it to an eastern European setting. In a similar vein, Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird takes inspiration from the spaghetti Western – namely, Sergio Leone’s iconic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – and casts 1930s Manchuria, itself a colonised state akin to the settler colonialism of the Old West, as the site of train robberies and Mexican standoffs. 

In Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau, a rural village experiences extreme sociopolitical turmoil in postcolonial Brazil, and directors Mendonça and Dornelles specifically channel Italian Westerns of the 1960s and ‘70s to create a thrilling, satiric mash-up of genres. And in South Africa, Flatland – directed by Jenna Bass, the co-writer of Wanuri Kahiu’s queer love story Rafiki – addresses the historic sidelining of women within the Western genre, following two women as they flee, Thelma and Louise-style, from brutish male violence. 

Back in the States, in First Cow, auteur Kelly Reichardt crafts a moving tale of friendship between two men, an American chef and a Chinese immigrant, in the 1800s exposing the era’s flawed promise of the American Dream and spotlighting the hazardous immigrant experience. Reichardt disrupts the era’s defining notions of greed and offers a parable on the perils of capitalism at a time when Western expansionism was in its infancy. 

MUBI’s ‘Neo-Westerns: A New Frontier’ season shows that the capacities of the Western are limitless because it’s a genre capable of endless reinvention. It’s a medium that can reinvent itself ad infinitum, not just in one corner of the U.S. but across the world by filmmakers of all nationalities. With Pedro Almodóvar as the latest director to put his stamp on the Western, it’s clear that the future for the Western is bright indeed.

Watch Strange Way of Life as part of MUBI’s Neo-Western season with 30 days free.

The post Beyond ‘Brokeback Mountain’: the daring directors reinventing the Western appeared first on GAY TIMES.