A daring 'Queer' doesn't quite payoff

 

 
   Much has been made about Daniel Craig's appearance in Queer, an adaptation of a 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, the Beat writer best known for Naked Lunch. A movie titled Queer marks an obvious departure for Craig, the actor who starred in five James Bond movies.

    Queer takes Craig as far away from Bond as possible, giving him the role of a gay, heroin-addicted writer living in Mexico City during the 1950s, a decade that, at least in cliche, was rooted in conformity, repression, and exaltation of the mainstream.

   A literary exile of sorts, Craig's William Lee spends more time drinking than writing in the seedy digs he rents. Dissolute and needy, Lee never leaves his small apartment without a pistol strapped to his side. Meant for protection, the gun also becomes emblematic of an hombre image, a man willing to go the violent distance if necessary. He offers a reasonable approximation of what might be called the William Burroughs look.

    Although he has little trouble finding sex, Lee stumbles when it comes to deeper relationships. He sees an opportunity for more than a fling when he meets Eugene (Drew Starkey), a handsome young photographer who we know will frustrate Lee's desires. Eugene quickly makes it clear that he has little interest in emotionally connected relationships. 

   Persistent to the point of obsession, Lee clings to Eugene, who seems untethered from nearly everything.

    Eventually, Lee persuades Eugene to accompany him on an Ecuadorian adventure. Lee plans to take a drug he's heard can make people telepathic. He hopes a psychedelic will enable him to bond with Eugene, assuming Eugene will reciprocate. Seen from the outside, the idea that they might become soul mates becomes the delusional denouement of an exotic travelogue.

   Working from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, director Luca Guadagnino uses the last third of his movie to conjure images of psychedelic tripping; he adds a touch of surrealism to the proceedings, a disorienting arrival considering the carefully studied grit of its Mexico City scenes. (Much of Queer was shot in studios.)

    Guadagnino has built a reputation for “art” movies with gay content, Call Me by Your Name being a prime example. The sex scenes in Queer are more graphic than anything Guadagnino included in Call Me by Your Name.

     A small supporting cast relieves the movie's thematic claustrophobia. Lesley Manville appears as an eccentric botanist who has been studying South American psychedelics, notably a drug called Yage. A resident of the jungle wilds, she's gone a bit bonkers. 

      In what might be his most interesting work to date, Jason Schwartzman plays Joe Guidry, a gay friend of Lee's who lives in Mexico City and who seems to enjoy rambling on about his many trysts. Joe's comfortable with himself in ways Lee can't be.

     Unfolding during a sometimes fatiguing two hours and 15 minutes, Queer slogs its way through three chapters and an epilogue, providing Craig with a platform from which to take a deep dive into alienation, self-abasement, and existential loneliness.

     But Queer has a dated quality. Burroughs wrote Queer in the late 1940s, when everything about it -- including its title -- might have seemed startling; for some. the novel became an immersive wallow in the defiance associated with living on the cheap, prowling dirty streets and sleeping on dirty sheets.

   To the extent that Queer can be seen as a thinly disguised memoir, it might generate interest among Burroughs enthusiasts or those who want to remind themselves that Craig, who has appeared in some 40 movies, successfully has escaped the Bond prison.

     Queer gives Craig plenty with which to work, but the movie -- part endurance test and part curiosity -- never coheres into the bold, challenging work that must have been intended. 

     I'd call it a missed opportunity, but I'm not sure for what.

   

Tennis anyone? Or is it something else?

 

   Challengers, the latest film from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name), thrives on energy -- the energy generated by competition, the energy that ripples through tennis matches, the energy that underlies sexual attraction, and, most of all, the energy of youth.

    Slick to a fault, Challengers pumps adrenalin into a plot that never wanders far from a surface in which the story's conflicts are so clearly drawn they might as well have been marked with chalk lines. 

   Built around a love triangle, Challengers spans 13 years in the lives of three characters, telling its story in flashbacks from a 2019 tournament that builds toward a fierce but ambiguous conclusion. 

   Tennis players Art and Patrick (Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor) renew a long-standing rivalry when both enter a challenger event, a low-grade competition in which A-list Art is supposed to tune up his flagging game. 

    O'Connor's Patrick has spent his life scuffling through a small-time career that has left him living in his car. He's familiar with tennis's lower rungs. You might think of him as a tennis bum.

    Both players are under the sway of Zendaya's Tashi, a once-rising tennis star whose career was derailed by a knee injury. A ferocious competitor, Zendaya eventually marries Art and channels her competitive drives into managing his career.

    Working from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino moves the story backward and forward, picking up fragments of backstory that could have served as pieces of a tantalizing jigsaw but knock the story off track.

     On or off court, Zendaya is the movie's driving force, commanding the screen as the woman who's coveted by Art and Patrick, both of whom are struck by Tashi’s charisma. In a scene set early in the story, Art and Patrick watch Tashi play and invite her to their motel room.

    Tashi initiates a simultaneous make-out session with both guys, unmasking the homoerotic tension that underlies the young men's adolescent friendship. Now 18, they’ve known each other since they were 12.

    From the start, Tashi makes herself into a prize to be earned in a competition between the two young players. During the motel scene, she piques their desire but leaves,  promising her phone number to the one who wins his match. 

   Years pass and the two teenagers grow into men. Tashi marries Art, but Patrick stays in the picture. He may not have achieved Art's level of tennis success, but he thinks he has Art's number — both on the court and in matters concerning Tashi.

    By the time the movie's final match arrives, Art has grown tired of high-pressure competition but worries that failure might cause Tashi to move on. Patrick thinks he has one more shot at the big time. Of course, they have to slam balls at each other in a showdown match. Balls hit rackets with plenty of whack.

    Guadagnino's camera works its way through matches, meet-ups, and closeups, practically insisting that we yield to its power.

    All of this plays against a musical score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that functions like a flashing red light, signaling whenever the dramatic stakes are about to rise.

   Despite a willing and watchable cast and Guadagnino’s directorial star turn, Challengers seldom deepens the immediacy it works so hard to create. Put another way, there's less here than meets the eye.

More than a simple shoemaker

   

  Director Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, Call Me By Your Name) has made a laudatory documentary about Salvatore Ferragamo, the shoemaker who became a fashion icon. 

     Ferragamo's life-long determination to make shoes took him to Hollywood, turned him into a shoemaker to the stars, and led to the establishment of an innovative global brand. 

   Largely based on Ferragamo's 1957 autobiography, Shoemaker of Dreams, the move -- entitled Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams --  includes recordings made by Ferragamo, interviews with designers such as Manolo Blahnik, archival footage, and a narration provided by Michael Stuhlbarg. 

   It's difficult not to fall under the glamorous sway of the stars who wore Ferragamo's shoes: Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn among them.

   As director Martin Scorsese points out, Ferragamo's arrival in California coincided with the rise of the movie business. Ferragamo must have understood that putting shoes on famous feet would enhance his reputation. 

   Eventually, Ferragamo returned to Italy where he established himself in Florence, went through a bankruptcy, and -- of course -- re-emerged. 

   Guadagnino's film talks about the way World War II forced Ferragamo to utilize new materials but has little to say about how he felt about the rise of Mussolini. Ferragamo lived through tumultuous times but his attention seems to have remained on his work.

   Mostly an outline of a life that began when Ferragamo left home at the age of 12, the movie pays tribute to a man who thought his greatest contribution was to combine design and comfort -- maybe too much tribute because the film is overly long and sometimes digressive.

   Still, Guadagnino chronicles the career of a man who seemed to leave little to chance, fashioning his life with one calculation after another. He became an apprentice in Naples. He went to the U.S. to learn whether US manufacturing techniques could be married to an artisan's ethos. He returned to Italy to add a "made-in-Europe" cache to his wares. He was obsessed with feet, so he studied anatomy. He married when he decided it was time to marry. 

     Ferragamo seemed to be making focused decisions from the age of nine, when he made his first pair of shoes for a sister's first communion. He died in 1960 at the age of 62. The business is still family owned.*

*If you're ever in Florence, make a point of visiting  The Ferragamo Museum, where you'll find many interesting exhibits and learn a bit more about Ferragamo's connection to the artists of his day.

‘Bones and All’ difficult to digest

    If you simply described the premise of Bones and All, a story about two cannibalistic teenagers trying to find their place in society, it might sound like an ordinary horror film with lots of coagulated blood and amped up tension. 

   In the hands of director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) the movie turns into something different, an indie-spirited accumulation of strange scenes that suggests deeper meanings, “suggest” being the operative word. 

   But suggesting and saying aren’t the same thing, and for most of it two-hour and 10-minute running time, I kept waiting for Bones and All to find something. I'm no sure what. Not some on-the-nose declaration of purpose but perhaps a door that swings open, inviting us to drop beneath the surface.

   Instead, Guadagnino suspends his movie in a low-rent limbo where nearly everything seems drab, unappealing and only potentially meaningful.

  Those looking for color will find it mostly in the blood that stains the faces of the movie’s young cannibals after they chow down.

   Without making too big a fuss about it, Guadagnino lets us know that the film, based on a YA novel by Camille DeAngelis,  is taking place during the ‘80s. Working phone booths. A TV repairman’s truck. (Yes, kids, people once had their TVs repaired). Music on the soundtrack. It's all from the '80s.

  In the film’s best performance, Taylor Russell portrays Maren, an 18-year-old cannibal kid who’s abandoned by her father (Andre Holland), a caring man no longer able to cope with his daughter’s proclivities. Every time she bites, they must uproot.

  Once dad is gone, Maren sets out on her own. Early in her journey, she encounters Sully, played by Mark Rylance with a vaguely southern accent, a long braid, and skin-crawling creepiness. Sully wants to teach Maren how to live as an “eater,” which is how those driven by irresistible flesh-eating urges refer to themselves. He also craves company.

  After wisely splitting from Sully, Maren meets Lee (Call Me By Your Name star, Timothee Chalamet), another “eater. 

   Unable to find niches in the “normal” world, the two travel around the country in Lee’s pick-up truck. During one encounter, they meet a couple of good-ole boys, also eaters (an unrecognizable Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green). 

  Stuhlbarg’s character explains the title. Ominously, he tells Maren and Lee that they won’t be full-fledged eaters until they consume a body “bones and all.”  

   There’s before bones & all and after, he says, signaling what I took to mean full and gleeful submission to one’s cannibal self. 

   Unlike the movie’s two main characters, these two are barbaric eaters. Or maybe they just don’t like leftovers.

  In another encounter, Maren meets her institutionalized mother (Chloe Sevigny), who presumably passed the macabre genetic heritage of “eating” to her daughter. Mom, by the way, had herself locked up so that she wouldn’t victimize anyone else. 

  The supporting cast fully embraces these whacky roles. Chalamet charts his own weird course.

  The movie attempts to redeem itself by showing that Maren and Lee don’t really want to be “eaters,” although they take different approaches to their unexplained  “affliction.” 

  Maren adopts a moral stance: She’d rather not kill. Lee says he has no choice. It’s not clear, though, whether Maren can choose to be a more acceptable kind of carnivore.

  Guadagnino doesn’t cop out on gore and those who are squeamish about such things should probably find another movie about two outsiders roaming a lonely, creepy world. 

   If you’re wondering whether Maren and Lee eat regular food, they do — at least until the need to feed on human flesh overcomes them. I guess the movie wants us to see them as a couple of kids desperately in need of connection. 

  The movie's saving grace, such as it is,  lies in Guadagnino’s understanding of the sadness of outcasts.

   And, yes, it takes talent to draw us into this bizarre world and accept (or at least adjust to) its terms, so much so that we forget to step outside and consider what we’re watching. 

   Should we do that, we might see Maren and Lee as needy kids who also happen to be killers who can’t control themselves. 

   When these kids get hungry someone dies. Just sayin’.

Beautiful setting. The people? Not so much

Ralph Fiennes excels in A Bigger Splash, a deviously slow-boil of a movie.

Tilda Swinton -- perhaps channeling the spirit of David Bowie -- plays rock star Marianne Lane in A Bigger Splash, a thriller posing as a vacation posing as a commentary on what happens when two men fix their attentions on the same woman.

That woman, of course, is Swinton's Marianne, a major star who's taking a break from the massive stadium shows that have marked her career. Marianne's voice is shot. She's recuperating, and fending off any thoughts that her career may have reached its end.

As a singer with damaged chops, Swinton goes through most of the movie either not talking or allowing whispery scratches to emerge from Marianne's debilitated vocal cords.

At first, it seems as if A Bigger Splash will be a sensuous idyll. Marianne and her lover Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) have retreated to a volcanic island off the Sicilian coast where they can be left alone. They sun themselves, sans clothing, at their pool and dip into the sensual pleasures of sunny relaxation.

The mood shifts when an uninvited Harry (Ralph Fiennes) turns up. Harry used to be Marianne's producer and lover. He's the one who pushed her toward Paul, a documentary filmmaker by trade.

Fiennes gives the movie's most intriguingly bold performance. Harry's an ebullient fellow whose every gesture -- even the one's that seem superficially nice -- come across as acts of aggression. He doesn't just fill the refrigerator, he stocks it to the bursting brim.

Under the guise of being honest, he crosses barriers of intimacy that should be respected, not toppled.

As the annoyingly uninhibited Harry, Fiennes -- at one point -- dances to the Rolling Stones Emotional Rescue. It's a funny bit, but it's another instance of Harry's barely concealed ferocity. He's all angles, less a guest than an invasion.

Harry is accompanied by his daughter (Dakota Johnson). Johnson's Penelope seems bored and aloof -- and hovers around Paul like a ripe apple that's waiting to be bitten.

Director Luca Guadagnino, who directed Swinton in 2009's I Am Love, loosely remakes the 1969 French thriller La Piscine, but you don't need to know anything about that movie to sense the tension that simmers beneath the movie's appealing languor.

We wait -- and then wait some more -- for the eruption that's bound to come from putting all these folks into the same hot-house environment. The movie's slow-boil approach won't be to everyone's taste.

There are some brief flashbacks that show us the relationship between Harry and Marianne and between Harry and Paul, but most of the movie takes place in the Italian present.

Toward the end, Guadagnino shifts gears, and we're suddenly in another movie -- albeit one that he's suggested along. Why else the shots of snakes or the agitated thriller-like musical score that seems to contradict the sun-drenched backdrops?

A Bigger Splash tries to stir larger thematic waters than initially seem possible in a movie about a group of people who are accustomed to living in an elite world. I'm not sure that Guadagnino gets quite that far, but along the way, I think, he makes his point: Not all the baggage folks bring on vacation can be stuffed into a suitcase.