Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” made its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, September 9. His adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel stars Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey as the two showcase just how ruinous an addictive, life-altering love can be.
In the film, there’s a graphic sex scene involving Craig and Starkey, where the camera starts on them undressing, then pivots out the window. In “Call Me By Your Name,” Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer begin having sex, only for the camera to gear toward the window and cut to another scene. However, with “Queer,” instead of cutting to another scene, it cuts to Craig and Starkey going at it harder than any sex scene Guadagnino has portrayed.
When we asked Guadagnino if the “Queer” scene was rebuking criticisms of the “Call Me By Your Name” sex scenes, at the TIFF premiere, he told us, “I don’t think I was thinking this way, even though it was fun to make a cut to the window.”
“It’s more about these characters and the kind of urgency of finding a way to communicate through the bodies after all this longing,” he continued. “And so for me, the way sex plays in the movie, it’s specific to the way in which this story needs to be told more than in contradiction with the other movie.”
Beyond a star-making turn for Starkey, Guadagnino also showcases pop star Omar Apollo in his very first acting role. Though only onscreen for a limited time, Apollo makes his mark, and we expect to see a lot more of him very soon. At the beginning of the film, he meets Craig’s character, things quickly unfold, and Apollo appears in a full-frontal scene.
“Omar is divine,” Guadagnino told us of bringing him on board. “You know, this character … in the book, that is the first person that Lee actually meets in the movie. [It] was so important to be very precise and, at the same time, very iconic.”
“I always [have] been a fan of Omar,” he continued. “I thought that he could bring this feeling of contemporaneity to a movie that is set in a period that is far from us, because I think a great period drama behaves in relation with the present of the making of the movie. So I think Omar brings that.”
In IndieWire’s review, Ryan Lattanzio writes that the film “is about chemical addictions, yes. But it’s even more about being so addicted to a person that, no matter how much you turn yourself inside out trying to get them to love you — charming them with your literary voice, lathering yourself into a stupor on drugs, or even going to the far reaches of a jungle — they will never love you the way you want them to, and even telepathy couldn’t help explain to you why.”
Last summer, it was announced that Guadagnino would be directing an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Shards” for HBO. He has since left the project, and now, “Dream Scenario” filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli is heading it. Last summer, Jacob Elordi and Guadagnino were seen getting lunch in Italy, sparking rumors over whether they would collaborate for the series. We asked Guadagnino at the TIFF premiere if there was any truth to that, and he said, “No comment,” before adding in a wink.
“Queer” is set to debut theatrically from A24, with no release date yet. Guadagnino’s next film is “After the Hunt,” starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri; shooting wrapped in August.
