He is no longer the womanising 007, but a homosexual American addicted to drugs who is crazy about a boy much younger than him. Daniel Craig has moved away from his image with the immaculate James Bond tuxedo, the role that brought him worldwide stardom, and has come out of the closet as the protagonist of Queer, the eagerly awaited film by Italian director Luca Guadagnino which has premiered at the Venice Film Festival without escaping explicit sexual scenes.
“When I think about this movie, I think that if I saw it, it would be the kind of movie I would want to be in. These are the movies I want to see and I want to make,” said Craig, three years after No Time to Die in 2021, the last of his five editions as the most famous spy in the world.
In ‘Maldoror’, Sergi López plays the role of a murderer and paedophile inspired by Marc Dutroux
The British star plays William Lee, the alter ego of the sordid memoirs set in 1950s Mexico by William S. Burroughs, one of the most admired names of the beat generation, although he is also known for having excelled as a writer – as he himself acknowledges in the book’s prologue – after having shot his wife in the head when, during an evening of alcohol and drugs, she tried to imitate William Tell.
Translating Queer into the language of cinema was a teenage dream of Guadagnino, who fell in love with the book – which took three decades to be published, in 1985, because it was considered too scandalous – when, at just 17 years old, he was a “lonely and megalomaniacal boy from Palermo who dreamed of building worlds in the cinema”. “I think it really changed me forever. To be loyal to that boy I had to bring it to the screen,” said the director, author of Call me by your name, that celebrated x-ray of sexual awakening and first love.
Italian director Luca Guadagnino, among the stars of his ‘Queer’, actors Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig, at the premiere of the film
ETTORE FERRARI / EFE
Thus, in the Roman Cinecittà studios where Burroughs’ imaginary was reconstructed, this film was born, which yesterday filled Venice with eroticism. In the film, Craig becomes an American night owl addicted to heroin and tequila who wanders through Mexican nightclubs among a community of American gay expatriates in search of young people to have fun with. He falls in love with Allerton (Drew Starkey), whom he courts incessantly despite the student’s intermittent indifference, and even convinces him to go on a fantastic adventure in South America in search of a vine that indigenous communities turned into a hallucinogenic substance.
Guadagnino’s feature-length film includes the most graphic intimate scenes contained in the book, and his actors needed to dance in rehearsals to break the ice. “There is nothing intimate about shooting a sex scene in a movie, it is full of people watching. We wanted to make it as natural and real as possible,” Craig explained. Guadagnino even seemed offended when asked why he chose Craig for this role and whether James Bond could be gay. “Let’s be adults, nobody knows James Bond’s real desires. The important thing is that he does his missions well,” he concluded to applause.
The director was keen to have Craig for his much-desired film. He had admired him for many years as “one of the great actors of today”, but at first he ruled him out because he did not think the famous 007 would accept the role. “I said yes because of this man at my side. I have wanted to work with him for 20 years,” replied the actor, the most sought-after star on Tuesday at the Lido, with permission from Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton, who returned to the red carpet.
Actor Daniel Craig, on the red carpet holding hands with his wife, actress Rachel Weisz
ALBERTO PIZZOLI / AFP
Queer was not the only film to premiere this Thursday at the Mostra. Maldoror was also screened, a police film – out of competition – in which Catalan actor Sergi López plays the role of a murderer and paedophile inspired by Marc Dutroux, the Belgian “monster” who traumatised the world in the 1990s. “The fact that this is such a traumatic story for such a huge country makes it more disturbing and sometimes you feel guilty for playing such a character,” he told the press. With experience in playing villains in films such as Pan’s Labyrinth or Harry, a Friend Who Loves You, López argued that making this film was necessary to try to heal a social wound. In addition, Harvest was released, in contention for the Golden Lion, a strange metaphor about the dangers of modernity from the point of view of a remote Scottish rural community.
‘New Years’
Sorogoyen’s maturity series
After triumphing with As bestas and in the television format with Antidisturbios, Madrid native Rodrigo Sorogoyen establishes himself as a filmmaker with Los años nuevos, his new television series, which he presented this Thursday at the Venice Film Festival. It is a look at the end of youth, at the life that passes in the decade between 30 and 40, through the ten New Year’s Eves that a couple formed by Óscar (Francesco Carril) and Ana (Iria del Río) live. Or, what is the same, a tool to observe the growth of the millennial generation. It was an idea that he had in 2015, during a trip to Morocco with his ex-partner, when he realized that “if he looked back at each New Year’s Eve of the last ten years, different things always happened,” and he thought that he could understand what his life had been like up to that moment through those moments. The series, conceived as a “cinematic work,” will be screened in theaters and will premiere in the last quarter of the year on Movistar+.
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