QUEERING THE STORY

Luca Guadagnino directs Daniel Craig in an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1985 novella Queer

- RICH JUZWIAK

THE IMAGE ONSCREEN APPEARS JUST AS IT DID in a 17-year-old Luca Guadagnino's mind: as an infatuated man gazes at his object of desire, a translucent, almost ghostly version of his hand reaches out to stroke the face of his unwitting beloved. The words that inspired this image-ectoplasmic fingers and a phantom thumb-were written by William S. Burroughs in his 1985 semi-autobiographical novella Queer, which Guadagnino, now 53, read as a "solitary young man" in Palermo, Italy. He began work on an adaptation at 21, years before he'd direct his first feature film in 1999. Making Burroughs' description come to life was "simple," something out of the "old days" of cinema, the director says. "It's superimposed, but it's very strong," he adds.

With Queer, opening Nov. 27, Guadagnino has achieved not quite the impossible but the unlikely: he's rendered Burroughs' freewheeling prose into a coherent film. Set in early-'50s Mexico City, Queer follows Burroughs' literary alter ego William Lee (played by a multivalent Daniel Craig) as he pursues a younger man, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), who seems impenetrable until he's not. The courtship takes them into the wilds of South America and finds Lee blazed on alcohol, heroin, and psychedelics. The book is a sequel to 1953's Junkie and went unpublished for decades. Craig's performance is big, sometimes explosively so, and requires not only affected charm, but also deep sadness, the physical turmoil of opiate withdrawal, and some bumbling in the jungle. "We all were exhausted by the end," said Craig. "We were all just hanging in rags by the time we finished."