It’s 1950. William Lee is an American on the verge of forty, expatriated to Mexico City. He spends his days almost entirely alone, except for the few relationships with other members of the small American community. The encounter with Eugene Allerton, a young student who has just arrived in the city, gives him, for the first time, the illusion of finally being able to establish an intimate connection with someone. Queer is the new film by Luca Guadagnino, a project the director has wanted to realize for over 35 years, inspired by the scandalous novel by William Burroughs written in the 1950s and known in Italy by various titles including Diverso and Checca. Burroughs’ second, legendary novel, hidden for more than three decades (it only appeared in 1985), Checca was born from a carefully concealed event: the death of his wife Joan, killed by a gunshot by the writer under the influence of drugs.
“How can a man who sees and feels be other than sad?” William Burroughs asks himself in the last entry of his personal diary before his death. In adapting his second novel, published almost forty years after its completion, we have attempted to reply to this sombre invocation.
In addition to being a cinematic adaptation of the novel by one of the fathers of the Beat Generation—an attempt to adapt the story was also made by Steve Buscemi in 2011—the film is also a particular homage to one of the Palermo-born director’s favorite cult films, The Red Shoes by Powell and Pressburger, a classic melodrama that in 1999 was ranked ninth on the list of the best 100 British films of the 20th century and which Guadagnino has watched “at least 50 times before starting the shoot”. Throughout the story, set in Mexico, Lee develops an obsessive passion for Allerton, leading to unpredictable consequences. The plot is known for its non-linear structure—rich in hallucinations, sensations, and memories—in which the protagonist is considered the true alter ego of the author.
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