Although we are more than used to seeing actor Daniel Craig participating in sex scenes due to script requirements, none of the ones that appear in his five films in the James Bond saga are so sticky with sweat, saliva and other bodily fluids like the ones he plays in ‘Queer’. “Everyone knows that when filming these kinds of scenes there is no intimacy, but in any case, we tried to make them as moving and realistic as possible,” the actor explained today at the Mostra, where the film is competing for the Golden Lion. “And, above all, I“We try to have fun filming them.”
Director Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig in Venice. / ETTORE FERRARI
‘Queer’ has been directed by the Italian Luca Guadagninowhose filmography – which includes titles such as ‘Blinded by the Sun’ (2015), ‘Call Me By Your Name’ (2017) or the recent ‘Rivals’ (2023) – works as detailed deconstruction of desire. Perhaps no other filmmaker today has his ability to turn the essence of longing, romantic or purely carnal, into something tangible: his films can almost be touched and they even give off smells, some more pleasant than others. And, in the new film, desire is such an intense force that it pushes its protagonist to the Ecuadorian jungle in search of the ayahuascaa drug from which he hopes to obtain telepathic powers with which to read the mind of the young man who obsesses him.
Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in Venice. / MARCO BERTORELLO
‘Queer’ is based on the short novel of the same name that William S. Burroughs wrote in the early 1950s, while awaiting trial for the murder of Joan Vollmerand it was not published until 1985. He was inspired to write it by his relationship with Adelbert Lewis Markera former marine whom he met while staying in Mexico City, dedicated exclusively to to appease his alcoholism, his heroin addiction and his lustCraig does not make the mistake of personifying the mature Burroughs, that dry-voiced, hostile-attitude guy who from the 80s onwards became an icon of pop culture; his version is a younger guy, who has not yet published the novel officially considered his masterpiece, ‘The Naked Lunch’and who lives at the mercy not only of his instincts but also of his vulnerability and his incorrigible romanticism. a magnificent interpretation.
Daniel Craig and his wife Rachel Weisz in Venice. / MARCO BERTORELLO
As for the film that surrounds it, it is much less effective from a purely argumentative point of view than when it comes to dazzling us with some of its stylistic decisions and formal wonders – a slow-motion walk through the city streets to the rhythm of the ‘Come As You Are’ de Nirvanaa hallucinogenic scene in which two men vomit their hearts and, shortly after, they literally merge both their bodies and their spirits – whether it is to allow Guadagnino to immerse us in the most sordid corners of the Mexican capital, or to instruct us on the proper way to prepare a shot. “I am a gentleman who goes to bed very early and who has never taken drugs or smoked a cigarette, and can count all his lovers on the fingers of his hands,” the Italian explained to explain why he decided to make ‘Queer’. “I love making sure that even people with the most dubious behaviour are represented fairly on screen.”
The other of the works nominated for the Golden Lion presented today is the first feature film in almost a decade of Athina Rachel Tsangaria Greek filmmaker who once became one of the visible heads of the New Wave of Greek Cinema -the other, of course, was Yorgos Lanthimos- thanks to his second work, ‘Attenberg’ (2010). The first film of his career shot in English, ‘Harvest’ presents a toned-down version of the absurd humor and taste for the bizarre that define his previous filmography to set itself in an indeterminate historical moment between the mid-17th century and the mid-19th century, within a farming community that seems to function according to a socialist model of coexistence and which is violently shaken by the irruption on the scene of the official heir of the territory, which has a series of not exactly communist ideas to take economic advantage of it.
Rosy McEwen, Arinze Kene, Frank Dillane, Rebecca O’Brien, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Thalissa Teixeira and Caleb Landry Jones in the ‘Harvest’ strand. / ETTORE FERRARI
This is a work deliberately designed to make the viewer uncomfortable, as it throws him into the centre of a landscape as beautiful as it is gloomy and filthy and envelops him in a genuinely claustrophobic even though most of the action takes place outdoors. And the feeling of bewilderment that the film generates in this way – and by denying true specificity to many of its characters – contributes to making the metaphor it uses to remind us that viruses that plagued humanity then – the toxicity of patriarchy, xenophobia, the cruelty of capitalism– continue to wreak havoc. Tsangari closes ‘Harvest’ with a dedication to their own grandparentsresidents of Greece, “whose farmland is now a highway.” That’s it.
