Producers: Lorenzo Mieli and Luca Guadagnino   Director: Luca Guadagnino   Screenplay: Justin Kuritzkes    Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Henrique Zaga, Omar Apollo, Andra Ursata, Andrés Duprat, Ariel Shulman, Drew Droege, Michael Borrëmans, David Lowery, Lisandro Alonso and Colin Bates   Distributor: A24  

Grade: B

Luca Guadagnino began the year with his most overtly crowd-pleasing film, the rousing tennis-themed sex romp “Challengers.” Now he and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes return with one just as beautifully crafted but much less accessible, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs semi-autobiographical novella, written in the early fifties but published only in 1985.  It’s not inaccessible in terms of its basic narrative, which, despite some hallucinatory sequences is a fairly straightforward tale of a man desperately searching for love and connection, but in tone and affect, which are uncommonly bleak.    

For many the major selling point for “Queer”—probably the sole one in some cases—will be the presence of Daniel Craig, moving as far from his now-signature run as hyper-masculine James Bond as one could imagine.  He plays Burroughs’ fictional alter-ego William Lee, an American who’s fled to Mexico City, where he lives a life of endless bar-hopping and cruising for male sex partners.  Craig’s performance is an extraordinary piece of work, not merely because it shatters the Bond image most viewers will still have of him despite his very different work in the “Knives Out” series, but because it’s brilliant and bracing in its own right.  In his hands Lee, dressed in a white linen suit, tossing back shot after shot and filling ashtray after ashtray, exudes sweaty loneliness and despair even as he tries to appear upbeat, witty and seductive.        

An alcoholic drug addict who spends time with other gay men like jovially self-deprecating Joe Guidry (an almost unrecognizably burly, and delightfully louche, Jason Schwartzman) and ostentatiously swishy John Dumé (Drew Droege), Lee becomes obsessed at first sight with lankily handsome veteran Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), who initially reacts coyly to his obvious attention, spending much of his time with a woman (Andra Ursata) as Lee looks on.  But Lee is persistent, and eventually they connect and have sex; the relationship is strained, however, because of Lee’s possessiveness and Allerton’s ambivalence. 

So to maintain their bond Lee proposes to pay for a trip to Ecuador in search of yagé, a plant that purportedly can increase telepathic properties in those who use it.  The offer doesn’t come without conditions, but Allerton accepts and they’re off.  After dealing in Quito with the ravages of Lee’s addiction—there’s a fine recreation of Burroughs’ description of his consultation with a doctor (Michaël Borremans) there—Lee persuades a hesitant professor (Andrés Duprat) to provide him with the location of a botanist with knowledge of the plant.

Thus far Kuritzkes and Guadagnino have followed Burroughs’ text quite faithfully, even lifting a good deal of the dialogue from the novella, though they make room for embellishments, like the torrent of squeals that Craig adds to Lee’s description of an imagined dessert of a live pig covered with burning alcohol, and a few dreamlike interpolations.  But with the film’s third “chapter” they invent a new conclusion as the two men journey into the deep jungle, where they encounter the outrageously domineering Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville, obviously relishing the chance to go over-the-top) who, with her partner (Lisandro Alonso), has established a relationship with the locals and is expert in preparation of ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic porridge made from yagé. 

Lee and Allerton indulge in the brew and have a remarkable experience.  But it does not keep them together, even though they merge phantasmagorically during it—a fulfillment of the dreamlike union Lee had conjured up earlier in a protoplasmic projection, in Burroughs’ phrasing, as they watched Cocteau’s “Orpheus” back in Mexico City. (The special effect employed here is haunting.) A coda set years later reunites the aged Lee with Allerton, at least in the old man’s mind; the meeting, however, ends in an act that mirrors Burrough’s drunken, and likely accidental, killing of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in September, 1951.

This “new” final section of the adaptation, along with the allusive epilogue, aren’t appreciably more artificial than the earlier ones in tone (the dialogue very literary) and appearance (though some scenes were shot in Quito and Mexico City, the bulk of the picture was done on sound studios in Rome—kudos to production designer Stefano Baisi and costumer Jonathan Anderson), but it does seem devised to be more showy, a means for Guadagnino to put a personal stamp on the film. 

Still, Craig and Manville go to such rabid lengths to make it work that one’s willing to put up with its insistence on being wild and voluptuous, with the long merge sequence being particularly eye-catching.  It’s also here that Starkey, who’s been quite restrained in line with Allerton’s ambiguous response to Lee, finally lets loose to a degree.  Fortunately, Schwartzman reappears to add a dose of geniality to what’s become awfully somber.  The rest of the cast have only modest screen time, but there are sharp cameos from Omar Apollo as a one-night stand Lee has in Mexico City before focusing on Starkey, and filmmaker David Lowery as another of his conquests who sheepishly goes back to his wife in America.

The elegant otherworldliness of the film is accentuated by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s lustrous cinematography, the moody score by “Challengers” composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (embellished with some blatantly anachronistic needle drops), an evocative sound design by Craig Berkey and Alessandro Bonfanti, and the unhurried pacing of Guadagnino and editor Marco Costa.  The special effects are genuinely creepy, down to the final sequence that might remind you a bit of the close of “2001.”       

In the end “Queer” is as much Guadagnino as Burroughs, an adaptation that reflects the director’s gaudy vision as much as the author’s confessional.  But with Craig an all-important third element, it proves an intriguing, challenging combination.     

Producers: Uberto Pasolini, James Clayton, Roberto Sessa, Kostantinos Kontovrakis and Paolo del Brocco    Director: Uberto Pasolini   Screenplay: Edward Bond, John Collee and Uberto Pasolini   Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer, Marwan Kenzari, Claudio Santamaria, Ángela Molina, Tom Rhys Harries, Nikitas Tsakiroglou, Jamie Andrew Cutler, Moe Bar-El, Amir Wilson, Jaz Hutchins, Hugh Quarshie, Chris Corrigan, Aaron Cobham and Amesh Edireweera   Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: B

The old adage is that even Homer nods, but the ponderous pacing of “The Return,” Uberto Pasolini’s revisionist take on the ending of “The Odyssey,” might just make some viewers nod off instead.  If you can tune in to the film’s somber wavelength, however, you will appreciate it as a thoughtful reflection on the traumatic toll war inevitably takes on even the most hardened and celebrated of soldiers.

The two great Greek epics ascribed to Homer, the “Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” tell the tale—in part at least—of the legendary Trojan War.  In the latter work Odysseus, the clever king of the island of Ithaca who conceived the stratagem of the Trojan horse, goes through a long series of adventures trying to get back home to his patient wife Penelope and young son Telemachus.  Once back, he must contend with the many suitors who have congregated to demand Penelope to choose one of them as her new husband, eventually killing them all with Telemachus’ help and reclaiming his throne.

The script for “The Return,” by Edward Bond, John Collee and Pasolini, jettisons all of Homer’s references to divine intervention and ignores the ten-year string of trials that prevented Odysseus from reaching Ithaca after Troy’s fall.  Instead, it begins with Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washing up naked on the island’s shore, taken in and tended by the faithful swineherd Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria), who does not recognize his old master.  (Initially, as in Homer, only Odysseus’ old hunting dog Argos does; the animal then promptly dies.)

Meanwhile Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) suffers humiliation at the hands of the suitors led by preening Pisander (Tom Rhys Harries) and quietly threatening Antinous (Marwan Kenzari), and Penelope (Juliette Binoche) tends to her weaving, preparing a funeral shawl for her addled father-in-law Laertes (Nikitas Tsakiroglou).  She promises to choose a new husband after completing it but prolongs the process by undoing each night what she’s woven during the day, hoping for her husband’s appearance before the deception is discovered.     

This Odysseus is not Homer’s hero.  He’s a broken man, haunted by all the men who ventured with him on the expedition twenty years earlier and perished while he survived, and unable to forget the horrors of battle and everything he’s suffered since the end of combat.  At one point he muses that for some soldiers, war becomes home, a place they’re forced to remain in even after the carnage is over.  He embodies the traumatic effect of war on its participants and the struggle to adjust to “normalcy” that poses intractable obstacles.  It’s a subject “The Return” shares with “The Best Years of Our Lives,” though the times and circumstances of the two films are profoundly different.

Fiennes gives an impressive performance as a man in anguish over what he’s become, wondering whether he’s worthy of the wife he left behind or of the son who hopes for his father’s return on the one hand but is angry over his absence on the other, a boy torn between wanting to confront the suitors and begging his mother to choose one of them.  He also proves physically convincing when Odysseus eventually decides to shed his beggars’ clothing and stand up to the men ravaging his realm—the narrative retains the challenge Penelope sets down for the suitors to string her husband’s bow and successfully shoot an arrow through a gauntlet of axes—and mow them down. Plummer, on the other hand, has some difficulty with the abrupt changes in his character’s attitudes, understandably since the screenplay doesn’t really manage to explain them adequately.  (When he decides to leave Ithaca at the close, as his father explains, “to find himself,” you might agree that it’s a goal that might apply to both Telemachus and the actor playing him.) 

The two do combine, though, in a rousing closing bloodbath that, as staged by Pasolini and cinematographer Marius Panduru and edited by David Charap, should go some way to satisfy those disappointed by the absence of CGI monsters, gods and goddesses.  Binoche, meanwhile, projects the steadfastness of Penelope though Pasolini’s solemn approach doesn’t allow for much emotional demonstrativeness on her part; she demonstrates the character’s steeliness mostly through the glare of her eyes.

As for the rest, Santamaria makes a strapping Eumaeus, while Ángela Molina has some telling moments as Eurycleia, the elderly nurse who recognizes Odysseus from an old scar, as does Tsakiroglou as the doddering “old king” for whom Penelope is weaving that funeral shawl.  Among the suitors Tom Rhys Harries has little trouble embodying the pugnacious Pisander, but like Plummer Kenzari has some bringing Antinous into focus.  On the one hand his smooth, oily pursuit of Penelope possesses understated menace (and, as some of his colleagues suggest, real desire), but his abrupt changes of attitude about Telemachus, at one point protecting him as a means of persuading Penelope to accept his suit and then suddenly advocating for his murder, seem arbitrary.

One thing that truly stands out in “The Return,” however, is the starkness of the settings, as designed by Giuliano Pannuti and shot by Panduru on striking locations in Corfu, the Peloponnesus and Italy.  As befits Pasolini’s take on the material, Rachel Portman contributes a mostly mournful score, which nonetheless perks up during the action scenes.

There will be those who regret that “The Return” doesn’t tackle “The Odyssey” in all its mythological glory, but previous attempts to do so, on screens big and small, have been pretty dismal.  This film offers a revisionist take on Odysseus’ fabled homecoming that possesses universal resonance, and, propelled by a powerful performance from Fiennes, proves both intelligent and moving.  But appreciating it does require a viewer’s patience.