The final chapter of William S. Burroughs’ Queer, the unfinished, semi-autobiographical novella published in 1985, picks up two years after expat William Lee travels with his younger lover, Eugene Allerton, into South America to find the psychotropic drug yage, otherwise known as ayahuasca. Lee returns to Mexico City, where the story began. He wanders the streets, snapping photos of locals along the way, hoping to run into Allerton or, at the very least, learn what happened to him. Allerton had stopped returning Lee’s letters some time ago, and the sting of their broken relationship lingers.
All of that is there in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, the adaptation of the story. What’s different is the depiction of Lee and Allerton’s profound, hallucinogenic experience while on ayahuasca and the movie’s full jump into the surreal with its epilogue.
The Lee of the novella references various dreams he has about reuniting with Allerton again, but it doesn’t compare to the fantasy that Daniel Craig’s Lee experiences on screen. It’s as if his past, present, and future collide together. Images depict Lee falling alone through space, gazing inside a miniature apartment complex to see himself walking down a hallway, holding a gun alone in a room, seeing Allerton one last time, and lying in bed as an aged man, among other snapshots.
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