If you’re looking for some moody introspection to start your Monday — and who isn’t? — look no further than the new trailer for the William S. Burroughs adaptation “Queer,” directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Daniel Craig as an expatriate in postwar Mexico City exploring his homosexuality. Take a look at the new trailer for “Queer” below.
Just watching this thing is a haunting reverie set to some of Trent Reznor and Atticus’s lush score.
“Queer” has been some new cinematic ground for Craig as an actor. Look at how he awkwardly gives a tongue-in-cheek courtly bow to introduce himself in a bar to Drew Starkey’s much younger man. Clearly he’s infatuated with Starkey’s character from the start. And what follows is a torrid love affair, featuring some of the more graphic gay sex scenes you’d see this side of Pedro Almodóvar.
It’s the kind of daring performance that Craig himself admitted to the New York Times he wouldn’t have attempted when he was first portraying James Bond.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” Craig said if “Queer” had been offered to him 10 years ago. “I was so wrapped up in Bond and what that was, I would have been terrified of doing something like this.”
“Especially early on with Bond, I was like, ‘This is enough. Stay in my lane.’”
IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio gave “Queer” an A rating out of the Venice Film Festival this fall. “Luca Guadagnino’s profound and kaleidoscopic new film begins in a post-World War II Mexico City of the mind and ends in the Ecuadorian rainforest on an ayahuasca trip that’s part Apichatpong Weerasethakul, part ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but fully the ‘Call Me By Your Name’ director’s own strange, sui generis creation,” Lattanzio wrote. “All sweaty, raw, self-lacerating, and debauched, William Lee (Daniel Craig) is an ex-pat who wanders from bar to bar in the Mexican capital in the 1940s, here recreated at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios with the rigorous detail, scope, and strangeness of the warehouse mindscape in Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Synecdoche, New York.‘”
As for those sex scenes, at the Venice Film Festival press conference Craig said, “You know as far as I do: There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set. You’re in a room full of people watching you. We just wanted to make it as touching and as real, as natural, as we possibly could. Drew was a wonderful, beautiful, fantastic actor to work with, and we had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.
