Venice Film Festival: Queer Sensibilities

Pedro Almodóvar has been touting an English-language debut as soon as his credibility rose at the beginning of the millennium. An Oscar in your hand for Talk to Her, a large American audience through the work of Sony Pictures Classics, and suddenly you flirt with making Brokeback Mountain, before Ang Lee took the reins. Another possibility, somehow, was The Paperboy, infamously made later by Lee Daniels.

Almodóvar is the sole credited screenwriter on The Room Next Door, but it was only recently revealed that it has a direct literary source, Sigrid Nuñez’s What Are You Going Through. But with the inherent surprise and novelty of the film at hand, I was keen to take it at face value, and not think too hard about its origins.

The film has already been described as an autumnal, reflective and typically “late” work from Almodóvar, but I was buoyed to recognise more of the playful, knowingly provocative spirit of his 80s work. The crux is its perspective on the topic of end-of-life care and the acceptance of death: from this serious preoccupation, he finds a risky, speculative and irreverent way to dramatise it.

We’re in such a haute-bourgeois literary world here, with the opening scene taking place at an independent New York bookstore signing, establishing a certain milieu with more affection than satire. Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is a novelist basking in the success of her latest publication, when a past close friend she meets at the signing reveals another, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is dying of inoperable cancer. Martha and Ingrid were colleagues at an art magazine in swinging 80’s Manhattan, so they quickly reconnect at the former’s hospital bedside.

Growing close again, Martha gives Ingrid a quite immodest proposal: echoing her long and fulfilling career as a war correspondent in Bosnia and Iraq, she wants to die in the company of others or another, especially as she is fully estranged from her daughter, her only living immediate family member.. Martha invites Ingrid to a plush, modernist house in Woodstock, far upstate; she will choose exact hour of her death with an illegally gained euthanasia pill, the only condition for Ingrid being that she stays with her in the room next door.

That’s a preposterous, manipulative and juicy set-up, no question, but Almodóvar’s ensuing feints and Hitchcockian upturning of expectations convinced me he’s having fun, revelling in making Ingrid and us uncomfortable. It’s probably too contained and minimal to count with his best work in this mode, such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or All About My Mother, yet I was largely hooked by how he led Moore’s well-meaning, sometimes too-trusting character down a path of criminality and complicity.

I have such a precise memory of seeing White Noise at Venice 2022, Noah Baumbach’s ill-fated adaptation of Don DeLillo, and feeling grateful for David Cronenberg nailing the American postmodernist’s chilly tone much more convincingly in Cosmopolis. So I’m going to risk tiring my readers again, with Cronenberg’s superlative film of William S. Burroughs’ transgressive classic Naked Lunch in the forefront of my mind as Luca Guadagnino’s Queer unfurled this morning.

Guadagnino is a very interesting, talented filmmaker, and has won over several of his critical doubters since breaking through with the florid I Am Love in 2009. But maybe from the evidence of his ambitious, worthy Suspiria remake, and this subsequent, quite disappointing passion project, he thrives more when suppressing his brash, high-style instincts.

Call Me By Your Name was so contained, being shot in a real Northern Italian villa, with every composition designed around the same roomy wide-angle lens by his key collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. With his undenied excellence, he’s been given a blank cheque, made out the the devil’s candy (to cite Julia Salamon’s canonical book on the catastrophic film of The Bonfire of the Vanities): the full resources of Cinecittà, a prestigious literary source and actor in Daniel Craig, and full sway to conjure the erotic and psychedelic dimensions of the novel.

Still, something is missing: Craig as Burroughs stand-in William Lee is charismatic, voluble and arrogant, but he’s just a hipster-dandy; Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who made a better pairing on their previous film Challengers) can’t capture the sinister, anti-social aspects of Burroughs, and the actual rationale for him being down and out on this soundstage-constructed Mexico City is quite occluded. Burroughs was so important and influential as a non-conformist, “drop out” icon, not this photogenic man in Craig who’s inclined towards tenderness (a partial saving grace of the film). His libido, lust for heroin, and anti-rationalist beliefs in the novel are wrought in alienation: no one in Mexico and then Ecuador wants anything to do with this guy.

Guadagnino’s best films are unashamed and analytical portraits of desire: in his pursuit, affair and eventual loss of Allerton (Drew Starkey), he does evoke a default state of loneliness and yearning for many gay men, and that this young army man was one of the great loves of his queer life. Yet the psychological insight is still tepid, and Guadagnino succeeds far more simply depicting transient human connection, than his surrealist interludes, anachronistic music choices (there’s a lot of Kurt Cobain and Prince) and his devotion to his hero’s early novel that he reconstructs the flesh of, but not the dark heart.