And the intention of DOWN LOW was to make a really gay movie for really gay people.
BIG SCREEN Purloining “queer” as a title, the movie just has to be exceptional. But we can relax. It’s helmed by Luca Guadagnino. Also, Daniel Craig is the leading man.
You’ll recall Guadagnino as the director of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and more recently CHALLENGERS. premiered to raves—and throbbing libidos—at the Venice Film Festival, QUEER is the “ebulliently scuzzy and adventurous” cat-and-mouse film.
In the adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ ahead-of-its-time semiautobiographical novel, Craig plays Bill Lee, who cruises the bars looking to score sex and junk in 1940s Mexico. Life is debauched, until that handsome twentysomething gent wanders into Lee’s favorite watering hole. You think heroin is hard to kick? Try detoxing from true love.
Craig’s acting is getting loads of attention, but praise is eclipsed by the surprise by how explicit the film’s (two!) sex scenes are. While we enjoyed the gorgeously erotic coming-of-age gay love story CALL BY YOUR NAME, we were bothered when the film’s big sex scene ends before any explicit action. Together we groaned, “C’mon!!!” But the sex scenes in QUEER are being called the most explicit in any mainstream movie.
“That Guadagnino briefly pans out a window during [sex scenes in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME], only [in QUEERS] to cut back to the lovers to find them going at it even harder than before, could suggest the filmmaker is trolling critics of the controversially coyer sex scene in CALL BY YOUR NAME, which panned to a tree outside the bedroom of an Italian villa as Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer started going at it,” writes INDIEWIRE’s Ryan Lattanzio. But the true revelation is that Craig could be queer and masculine, a man of “forbidden” desire as well as his own gruff, open, aggressive self.
“If I wasn’t in the movie and saw this movie, I’d want to be in it,” Craig told reporters. “It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there. They’re challenging but hopefully incredibly accessible.”
For Guadagnino, the film is deeply personal. He read Burroughs’ short novel as “a lonely boy in Palermo” and was struck by “the complete lack of judgmentalism in the way these characters were behaving.”
There’s been chat galore of the director’s desire for a CALL BY YOUR NAME sequel. However, “there is no hypothesis, so there is no movie. It’s a wish and a desire, and I have not made up my mind about what would be the story.”
► Frustrating, tell me about it. Though A24 Studios acquired QUEER’s U.S. distribution rights following festival screenings, no release date has been revealed, only “later this year.”
Quinto and Lukas Gage, in DOWN LOW.
Photo: Rightor Doyle/Instagram
LITTLE SCREEN With DOWN LOW, director Rightor Doyle’s desire was to make a really gay movie for really gay people. (So it’s not BROS.)
“I think the movie doesn’t apologize for the inside-jokiness of itself. When we were making it, we found it really resonates with a gay audience. And we didn’t want to have to explain ourselves or apologize for ourselves at every turn. I also think the movie is for anyone, if they choose to see themselves in it.”
DOWN LOW centers on a repressed gay man (played by Zachary Quinto) and the guy (Lukas Gage, a fave after the inaugural rimming scene in WHITE LOTUS) that he invites over to give him a massage. There’s some darker elements to it that come along in the movie, but it starts as this kind of weird buddy relationship then evolves – or devolves, depending on how you think of it.
► Streaming on Netflix and available to rent or buy on digital.
