FILM
KING KONG AIN’T GOT NOTHING ON HIM
Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in Queer. Courtesy: Yannis Drakoulidis / A24
The Sie FilmCenter celebrates DENZ-EMBER
JUNK MAN
BY MICHAEL J. CASEY
‘Queer’ is an odyssey worth taking BY MICHAEL J. CASEY
Q
ueer knows how to hide its secrets. The film opens with William Lee (Daniel Craig) in a Mexican village. Like his fellow expats, Lee spends most of his days drinking and cruising for sex. Later, he reveals he had to leave the States because of “his disease.” (He’s gay, and this is the 1950s.) So Lee became a gentleman of leisure, rocking rumpled off-white linen suits perpetually soaked in sweat. Lee’s not what you would call out and proud, but he’s not exactly the self-loathing type either. He cruises the same half-dozen bars, spends most of the day drinking with the same men — his relationship with the pleasantly plump Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman) is the closest Queer gets to a romantic relationship — and not working. Lee’s a writer, mostly likely a mirror of the source material’s author, William S. Burroughs, but you never see him write. You do see him drink. A lot. Lee’s a drunk, but he’s also a junkie. Heroin is his drug of choice, and though director Luca Guadagnino teases that bit of information in the movie’s opening credits, Queer takes its time getting back to it. When Lee shoots up, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camera hangs over Lee slipping into a pleasant junk haze while New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” plays uninterrupted for almost four minutes. You may find yourself repulsed by Lee — his haircut screams neo-Nazi, and his name echoes the Confederacy — but he is charismatic, and whiling away the afternoon in these Mexican bars isn’t an unpleasant experience. But once Lee takes a young lover, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), we see how far down the opium rabbit hole he’s gone and how desperate he’s willing to be.
BOULDER WEEKLY
Adapted from Burrough’s novella of the same name, Queer plays like Luca Guadagnino’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — another movie that approached its material with a deliberate pace. In both, the narrative provides enough room for the audience to wonder where the story is heading next. It also allows time to reconfigure those assumptions. And Queer’s final third will require an awful lot of reconfiguring. Throughout the movie, Lee speaks of a South American root he read about in a magazine — yagé — that can induce telepathy. The Russians are using it for mind control, or so he believes, as is the CIA, or so he surmises. Lee is very interested in yagé. He claims he wants telepathy but never says why. Maybe he wants to know what Eugene really thinks of his older, more demanding patron. Or maybe Lee is looking for the next great high. This isn’t like a high you’re used to, Doctor Cotter (Lesley Manville) assures him. But Lee doesn’t care. The consumption of the yagé — or ayahuasca, as it’s commonly known — unmoors Lee. Nothing he sees or hears from this moment on will be grounded in any sort of reality. Ditto for the viewer. Guadagnino, Mukdeeprom and editor Marco Costa craft images that are distinctly unreal and uncertain. But wasn’t that always the case? Those Mexican streets Lee stumbled across from cantina to cantina never looked like real Mexican streets, did they? Were those characters sitting at that table in the corner ever there? And where did that pool table come from? But by the time Lee finds his bedroom beyond Jupiter, you wonder if any of this ever really happened.
ON SCREEN: Queer is currently in limited release and opens wide on Dec. 13.
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Choudhury) and Demetrius (Washington). Of Indian heritage, Mina and her family were forced out of their home in Uganda when Idi Amin took power in the early 1970s. Now, they live in and run a roadside motel, like many other Indian immigrants in the Deep South. And like the others, Mina exists on a thin margin, as does Demetrius, who owns a carpet cleaning business. Demetrius is successful, but only because of a tenuous relationship between the Indians running the motels and the white bankers running Mississippi. But as significant as that background is, and Mississippi Masala devotes an adequate amount of time to it, the heart of this story revolves around the sweet and sexy romance of Mina and Demetrius. Washington is Sarita Choudhury and Denzel Washington in Mississippi downright radiant in Masala, screening in the Sie FilmCenter’s DENZ-EMBER his youth and comprogram. Courtesy: The Criterion Collection mand. He was roughly 10 years into his career plus four, DENZ-EMBER culmiwhen he made Masala, yet here he nates on Dec. 22 with a four-movie is, in all his Washington glory, a true secret marathon. force of conviction softened by All are must-sees, but the one those sparkling eyes and that disthat often gets overlooked is an arming smile. earlier entry into the Washington canon: 1991’s Mississippi Masala from filmmaker Mira Nair. Befitting of the word “masala” in ON SCREEN: Mississippi the title, Nair’s international and Masala screens as part of intergenerational drama is a colliDENZ-EMBER. Noon sion of forced immigration and prejSaturday, Dec. 7, Sie udice, beautifully illustrated in the FilmCenter, 2510 E. Colfax car crash that instigates the meetAve., Denver. $12 cute between Mina (Sarita e’s one of our greatest living actors, and Denver’s Sie FilmCenter is here to prove it with a 10-plus-four film series tracing the range and charisma of the incomparable Denzel Washington. The series kicked off Dec. 1 with Malcolm X — followed by Training Day on Dec. 4 — but you still have a chance to see Virtuosity (Dec. 6-7), Mississippi Masala (Dec. 7), Devil in a Blue Dress (Dec. 8), Inside Man (Dec. 11), Fallen (Dec. 13-14), Philadelphia (Dec. 14), Fences (Dec. 15) and Much Ado About Nothing (Dec. 21). As for the
DECEMBER 5, 2024
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