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by HR Smith

Luca Guadagnino is a great editor of other people’s love stories. With this past spring’s Challengers, he took a fairly basic screenplay about tennis bros and queered it up to 11. In Bones and All (2022) he edited down an often-bratty young adult novel into a luminously gory homage to William Eggleston’s photographs of American landscapes. In Call Me by Your Name (2017) he excised its source novel’s inexplicable interlude where the two main characters, Elio and Oliver, listen to a poet reminisce about how he once went to Thailand and wanted to fuck absolutely everyone there. 

In Queer, Guadagnino takes on his greatest challenge—making a swoony period romance about William Burroughs, based on Beat author’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. “This movie for me is much more than a personal biography of the author,” said Guadagnino, in an interview with the film’s US distributer A24. “The novel revealed a truly romantic character who was yearning for love.”  

This goal is helped by the fact that Queer is set in the 1950s, a particularly swoony era for outfits, and costumed by Jonathan Anderson, who is perhaps a little too good at his job. Even when Daniel Craig (who plays Burroughs under the author’s old pen name, William Lee) and Drew Starkey (who plays the object of Lee’s affection, Eugene Allerton) are supposed to be sweaty and disgusting, they look like they are in an ad to sell you something expensive.

William Lee (Daniel Craig) weeps into Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey)’s shirt. But it still sort of looks like a watch commercial. YANNIS DRAKOULIDIS, COURTESY OF A24

Guadagnino shot most of the movie in a fake Mexico City built inside Italy’s legendary Cinecittà Studios, which gives the film a dreamy, unrealistic quality. It’s disappointing because cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is one of the great poets of the location shoot, and this film feels a little airless in comparison to his and Guadagnino’s earlier films. But his camerawork still beautifully captures the eerie perceptiveness of infatuation, where you want to soak someone in, but can barely stand to be seen yourself.  

Burroughs has been described as “the first punk.” Like a lot of people who like to expound on how everything sucks, he was deeply sentimental on a few choice subjects—adolescent boys, youngish men who kind of looked like boys, and (later in life) cats. Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes keep the yearning, where appropriate, and carefully excise most places where it isn’t. They wisely omit sections where Lee drools over boys, compares Latin Americans to animals, and describes Mexicans as a bunch of murderers. 

They also edit out sections that presage Burroughs’ later Naked Lunch-era, where he gave us body-horror vignettes like “Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?” Instead, when Lee nervously comes out to Allerton he tells a story about “Bobo,” a queen from Baltimore, who, Lee claims, prevented him from committing suicide by telling him that it is his responsibility as someone who is queer to counter prejudice by emitting “a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink.” Left out of this monologue is the conclusion from the novel where Lee claims, improbably, that Bobo later died when his hemorrhoids got caught in the back wheel of a luxury sedan. 

What Guadagnino and Kuritzkes unfortunately fail to resist is the spectre of Burrough’s wife, Joan Vollmer. There is literally no need for Vollmer in Queer. Yes, Queer is a semi-autobiographical novel, but with a big emphasis on the “semi.”  In the book, there is no wife.

While Queer was first published in 1985, Burroughs wrote most of the first draft in 1952, while awaiting trial in Mexico City for shooting Vollmer in the head—in front of a group that included Lewis Marker (the real-life Eugene Allerton). Burroughs attributed Vollmer’s death to an accident, later to a malevolent spirit. Everyone else in the room said that it was an accident, or, more fancifully, that Vollmer was suicidal and psychically egged Burroughs on to kill her. Burroughs, for his own part, always maintained that this last theory was a cop-out.  

On the rare occasions that he spoke of her, Burroughs described Vollmer as “the only woman I’ve ever loved.” By all accounts she was a wild one. Both Vollmer and Burroughs lived in their own apartments, hooked up with whoever they felt like, did copious quantities of drugs, and were empirically terrible parents. The Beats were great mythologizers of their own lives, but because Burroughs couldn’t bring himself to write about her, Vollmer is mostly remembered—when she’s remembered at all—for how she died.

One story, told by Lucien Carr to Burroughs-biographer Barry Miles, gives a sense of what Vollmer was like to the people who remember her as a living person instead of a dead one. In 1951 (while Burroughs was traveling in Ecuador with Marker) Carr and Allen Ginsberg ran into Vollmer in Mexico City. Vollmer immediately roped them into driving a treacherous mountain route to Guadalajara to meet a weed dealer friend of hers. A case of polio had left her unable to work both the gas and the brake, so Vollmer steered, pushed the brake with her strongest leg, and passed around a bottle of gin. Carr lay on his stomach working the gas pedal, while Vollmer’s two kids cowered in terror in the backseat with Ginsberg. 

The night they drove back, the group detoured to Parícutin, an active volcano, that had emerged from a Mexican cornfield a few years earlier. “There was something tremendously compelling about Joan,” Carr told Miles. “ She was very, very bright and very exciting and very much in command of the tight situations she got into. She was sort of in command of everything but herself.” 

Carr remembered driving across lava fields, past the spires of a buried church. They only turned back when molten lava and rocks began to land on the car roof. “I can remember the car falling into crevices, and having to get it out with the jack,” Carr said. “And Joan saying, ‘Go on! Go on! Let’s get to the volcano!” 

In the film, Vollmer appears as a busty, Cocteau-like nude, spinning over a pedestal in a dream sequence. “I thought you was queer,” she says, as dream-Burroughs/Lee reaches up to cop a feel. The line feels so out of character that a filmgoer familiar with the Beats might hope that maybe this is just some random naked woman but nope, she’s identified in the credits as Joan. She appears in the film one more time—not in person, but in a not-so-subtle reference to her death. 

Guadagnino has said that he’s wanted to make a film of Queer ever since he read it as a teenager, living in Palermo, Sicily. He’s also upfront about how he never meant to follow the novel itself too closely. This makes perfect sense—Queer is, arguably, one of the best things Burroughs ever wrote, and very much in need of an editor. If you don’t know the history behind it, it’s possible to appreciate Queer as sort of a trippy Carol—age gap, vintage outfits, great production design—albeit with some uncomfortably tone-deaf portrayal of Indigenous culture later on. But as a real person, and one who never got the chance to tell her own story, Vollmer deserves better.

Queer opens in Portland at Cinema 21 and Hollywood Theatre on Thurs Dec 5.