Queer: Daniel Craig puts Bond to bed with this sensational – and explicit – gay drama

Playing an American expat cruising for sex in 1940s Mexico, Craig is superb alongside Drew Starkey in Luca Guadagnino’s gorgeous new film

You’d have to say that Daniel Craig’s latest feature puts his James Bond to bed once and for all. And “to bed” is very much the operative phrase. In a sense, it isn’t so different from his stint as 007: he plays a mysterious man, hard-drinking and impeccably tailored, on a clandestine mission overseas. 
The distinction is this. Craig’s gay middle-aged writer, William Lee, is in pursuit of nothing more (or less) than his own sexual fulfilment, at a time when to do so in the United States was an imprisonable offence. Down in Mexico City, among a loose community of like-minded souls, the stakes are lower – though perhaps only in a legal sense. 
His mission is as all-consuming as it seems to be self-defeating: the moment it’s complete, the prize slips from his grasp. Queer, which premiered at Venice to an even mix of boos and cheers, is the new film from Luca Guadagnino, and the busy Italian director’s most pristine and plangent work yet. It’s an adaptation (scripted by his Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes) of an early, unfinished, autobiographical novel by William S Burroughs. 
But while the book arguably reads today as blunt and gauche, Guadagnino’s take on the material is soul-swellingly lush and allusive. It’s made in an unapologetically romantic mode – by night, Craig is spotlit by street lamps like a noir private eye, while Mexico City itself looks dreamily unreal, like a sumptuous Vincente Minnelli set on the MGM backlot. 
It’s also notably explicit, with three sexual encounters that are about as graphic as modern male movie stardom allows. Fans of Guadagnino’s 2017 breakthrough hit, Call Me By Your Name, might recall the grumbling over a love scene in which the camera chastely pans towards some rustling trees. During one of Queer’s, we’re also treated to a similar view – but like Lee, the film’s not shy, and soon cuts hungrily back. 
Craig is sensational in a role swimming in psychological complexity, which he marshals with rare intuition and grace. Lee is a self-styled flâneur, sauntering between bars in a white linen suit while projecting an air of casual self-amusement – but as his own insecurities come into focus, this carefully cultivated persona is revealed as a heartbreaking nervous tic. He uses the term queer with superficial pride – but the word is also often freighted with sadness and self-loathing; in one scene, he likens his sexuality to a hereditary disease. 
Lee becomes fixated on an American serviceman, Drew Starkey’s Eugene Allerton, whom he spots in one of his watering holes, playing chess with a Joan Crawford-esque redhead (Andra Ursuta). Might he be queer too? That’s a mystery Lee is keen to solve, so he invites the handsome youngster on a trip south to track down a botanical hallucinogen called yage, which supposedly possesses telepathic qualities. Telepathy is a longstanding fascination for Lee, and understandably so: he has a vested interest in being able to hear the unsaid. 
Sure enough, the yage is out there – deep in the Uruguayan jungle, and protected by a near-unrecognisable Lesley Manville, who plays hilariously against type as a crackpot botanist. But Lee’s journey is also an inward one, towards a reckoning with the identity he has never quite been able to confront face-to-face. Queer doesn’t scrimp on provocation and pleasure, but it’s also a beautiful film about male loneliness, and the way a solitary life can so easily shade into a life sentence. 
Cert tbc, 151 min. Screening at the Venice Film Festival; UK release tbc