“I’m not queer- I’m disembodied,” says Eugene (Drew Starkey) to William Lee (Daniel Craig) as they are hallucinating like crazy in the jungle under the influence a native drug called “yage.” Luca Guadagnino’s transcendent film adaptation is from a William S. Burroughs’ memoir-like short novel he wrote between 1951 and 1953.
Daniel Craig plays Burroughs’ alter-ego William Lee, a dissolute expatriate in Mexico. In his linen suit, fedora and packing a handgun, Lee prowls the bars at night, hanging with his bearded, scruffy friend Joe (an unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman) who regales Lee with stories about all the tricks who ripped him off. One night he becomes intrigued with a handsome, mysterious, recently discharged American serviceman Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). He can’t make out if Eugene is straight or not but stalks him anyway from bar to bar until he finally gets him into his bed.
Their relationship is confused and strained at best, but Lee talks Eugene into making a journey with him into South America so he can experience this native drug that he believes with enhance telepathy. Lee’s heroin addiction catches up with him on the road when he starts to withdraw badly but they do make it to the heart of the jungle where they encounter a pistol-packing botanist- Dr. Cotter (an outrageous Lesley Manville) who lets William and Eugene experience the strange high of “yage.” That trippy sequence is sensationally surreal.
But in the end, it’s about a different kind of addiction. It’s obsession and lust and the memory of a past messy love that still burns into your memory and soul. Daniel Craig gives a fearless, heartbreaking performance. Drew Starkey plays the hesitant and inscrutable lover brilliantly. And the screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes conjures its own poetry. The film even ends with a Trent Reznor song over the credits with lyrics by William S. Burroughs (from a poem he wrote right before his death) and sung by the great Caetano Veloso. It doesn’t get any better than this.
You got it, Dennis. I may have see it. Like a drug I want to recapture the initial high.
Vince