February 10, 2025

amores perros, man on fire, mexico city, queer, romeo + juliet, spectre, y tu mamá también

Words by CHRIS LEADBEATER


Luca Guadagnino’s heady depiction of ’50s Mexico City in Queer is as seductive as the love affair at the heart of the tale. Hollywood Authentic celebrates a metropolis with a rich cinematic history and a spicy selection of attractions.

The last time we saw Daniel Craig on screen in Mexico City, he was striding across the rooftops along its main avenue. And death was lurking on the street below – in the form of gaudily coloured floats and giant cigar-chomping skeletons; a ‘Day of the Dead’ parade in full flow.

Death was on Craig’s mind as well, through the crosshairs of his rifle. As James Bond in Spectre, Craig sought men to kill. Fast forward a decade, and he is seeking men for thrills – in Luca Guadagnino’s opulent, delirious adaptation of William S Burroughs’ Queer, playing a thinly veiled cinematic version of the American writer and poet.

amores perros, man on fire, mexico city, queer, romeo + juliet, spectre, y tu mamá también

Part of the ‘Beat Generation’ of anarchic wordsmiths who helped to redefine the limits of literature in the mid-20th century, Burroughs wrote about his post-war ex-pat experiences in Mexico City, in a novella also titled Queer. Its pages were so crammed with content that would have been deemed shocking at the time that it went unpublished until 1985. This was a chaotic period in the writer’s life. Burroughs had fled the United States in 1949, in the wake of a drugs raid on his New Orleans home that had raised the prospect of jail time. Addicted to heroin, he tried to carve out a new life in Mexico City; bar-hopping, picking up lovers and ultimately, in September 1951, killing his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a riotous night at a friend’s apartment. He was, he said, attempting a ‘William Tell stunt’ of shooting a glass (rather than an apple) placed on top of her head – only to miss the target and hit his spouse. Whether this was (as he claimed) drunken high-jinks gone tragically wrong, or a pre-meditated act (he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia), remains a matter of debate. Burroughs made a run for it again before the case could come to trial, ultimately wandering the Ecuadorian Amazon (an ‘adventure-quest’ that the movie covers) in search of the psychedelic drug yagé (ayahuasca). 

Guadagnino has been obsessed with the novel since reading it in his youth. In his vicarious hands, Burroughs’ tale of ‘William Lee’, a drink-addled romantic, comes vibrantly to grubby-gorgeous life, as Craig’s crumpled-linen barfly pursues a young naval veteran, Eugene Allerton (a barely disguised avatar of Burroughs’ lover Adelbert Marker), played by Drew Starkey. A viewer will no doubt want to head straight to the airport and Mexico City after the end titles, thirsty for mezcal, sultry temperatures, the Baroque architecture and the sound of mariachi bands. But Guadagnino’s sleight of hand is so subtle that you scarcely notice one particularly important fact: that everything was filmed either on Italian soundstages (at the iconic Cinecittà Studios in Rome), or in Ecuador, where the capital Quito offered a splendidly convincing impression of its Mexican counterpart.

This, itself, is quite the feat, because Mexico City is hard to impersonate. It ranks as the biggest city in North America (and the sixth biggest on the planet); a melting pot of 22 million people. And it is fascinating when caught on camera. Even if Guadagnino’s lens is dealing in misdirection, plenty of other directors have cast the city as a star attraction. Its credit list over the last three decades has been impressive. And diverse – sometimes showing the city as an affluent jewel; at others, scratching at base layers of dirt and crime.

amores perros, man on fire, mexico city, queer, romeo + juliet, spectre, y tu mamá también

Y tu mamá también (2001) – Alfonso Cuarón’s coming-of-age masterpiece – pitches the city as an enclave of monied insouciance; a place that bored teenagers Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) cannot wait to leave, on an impromptu road trip to the Oaxaca coast with an alluring older woman. Cuarón repeated this trick in Roma (2018), his Oscar-winning dissection of family life in the well-to-do titular neighbourhood. But here, the world beyond the driveway is darker. Set in 1971, the plot draws on ‘El Halconazo’, that year’s brutal massacre of student demonstrators by paramilitary group Los Halcones.

This bleaker seam was mined by Tony Scott in his 2004 thriller Man On Fire – sending Denzel Washington into Mexico City as an ex-CIA bodyguard tasked with the protection of a rich man’s daughter (scenes were filmed in the city’s Estudios Churubusco, as well as surrounding districts). And Baz Luhrmann opted for an on-edge Mexico City in his 1996 tour-de-force Romeo + Juliet, using it as one of the real-life settings for his fictional Verona Beach. The Capulet mansion where the lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes) meet is the Chapultepec Castle, the former royal palace that, as of 1939, has been Mexico’s National Museum of History, perched on a hilltop that was sacred to the Aztecs.

The shadows are perhaps lengthiest in 2000’s Amores perros – the first chapter of the ‘Trilogy of Death’ directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Here, three seemingly distinct tales – of a barrio teen (Bernal), a model (Goya Toledo) and a hitman (Emilio Echevarría) – converge around a car crash. While several scenes were filmed in high-end neighbourhoods such as La Condesa and Lomas de Chapultepec, Iñárritu’s commitment to authenticity saw the tape roll in some of the city’s more deprived districts.

amores perros, man on fire, mexico city, queer, romeo + juliet, spectre, y tu mamá también

Such movies are a demonstration that, in a metropolis the size of Mexico City, there will always be light and shade; want colliding with wealth. But they are also evidence of the city’s strong directorial bloodline. Both born in its midst in the early 1960s, Cuarón and Iñárritu are just the latest visionaries to have emerged from the city’s fertile cultural soil. There have been many other ‘chilangos’ behind the camera – feted filmmakers Luis Estrada, Carlos Enrique Taboada and Juan Bustillo Oro, to name just three.

For all the occasional uncomfortable truths told by Cuarón and Iñárritu, Mexico City offers an upbeat (and safe) experience for visitors keen to embrace its charms – and a more immersive version of Mexico than that found on the beaches of Cabo or Cancun. Particularly amid the important sights of the Centro Historico – and in the more salubrious districts, where tourists are most likely to put down their luggage.

At root, the city is still Tenochtitlan, the pulse of the Aztec Empire, which was conquered by the Spanish crown in the first half of the 16th century. The main square, Zócalo, was also the centrepiece of the indigenous city, and its function remains unchanged. Its echoes are noisy, its past never invisible or inaudible. The National Palace, on its east side, is the seat of the Mexican government, but much of its masonry is a recycling of the palace of Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor whose reign (1502-1520) coincided with the arrival of the conquistadors. Similarly, the Metropolitan Cathedral – a Gothic pile, constructed in stages between 1573 and 1813, which stands on the north flank of the plaza – is also hiding a ‘secret’; it occupies some of the footprint of the Templo Mayor. This was one of the holiest sites in Tenochtitlan, devoted to Tlaloc (the Aztec god of agriculture and rain) and Huitzilopochtli (the god of war). You can still see its foundations next to the church.

There are more recent wonders, too. The Palacio de Bellas Artes – close to the leafy expanse of Alameda Central park – is an art museum as striking as the treasures inside it; a giddy mixture of Art Deco and Art Nouveau, crafted between 1904 and 1934. Its focus falls upon the same century; star exhibits include murals by Jorge González Camarena and Diego Rivera. The latter’s much more celebrated wife – Frida Kahlo – is also present.

amores perros, man on fire, mexico city, queer, romeo + juliet, spectre, y tu mamá también

Retail therapy can be sought in a range of tempting places – the department stores on the broad street of 20 de Noviembre in the Centro Historico; the haute-couture boutiques that decorate the Avenida Presidente Masaryk, where it sweeps through gilded Polanco.

Tastebuds can also be tantalised. While it is endlessly possible to lean on local staples – tortillas, tamales et al – 2024 brought the publication of a first Michelin Guide to Mexico, and with it, an even brighter spotlight on two of the capital’s most acclaimed restaurants. Pujol (pujol.com.mx), in Polanco, is the brainchild of Enrique Olvera – offering a modern slant on traditional Mexican dishes, all delicate tacos and palpable finesse. It is one of just two restaurants in the guide to have been handed two stars; the other is its Polanco neighbour Quintonil (quintonil.com), where chef-couple Alejandra Flores and Jorge Vallejo have also reinvented the national cuisine, with nine-course tasting feasts and fabulous mezcals.

Sleep can also be stylish and elegant. Perhaps at Condesa DF (condesadf.com), in the lovely neighbourhood of the same name – a design hotel, slotted into a neoclassical 1928 apartment building, whose rooms have been shaped by Mexican architect Javier Sanchez and Iranian-French interior designer India Mahdavi. Elsewhere, the St Regis Mexico City is a well known silhouette on the skyline (marriott.com) and boasts a perfect location. Its in-house spa deals in widescreen views of the cityscape, while its pool floats above the hubbub on the 15th floor; its King Cole Bar – one of the city’s best options for cocktails if you want to recreate Queer’s tippling – is a softly lit refuge from the commotion of Paseo de la Reforma outside.

If that busy boulevard (Paseo de la Reforma is an equivalent of Paris’ Champs-Élysées) looks familiar, it should. This was the very street catapulted to global attention by that spectacular Spectre opening sequence. Even if, again, sleight of hand was at play. Like Guadagnino’s CDMX (local slang for Mexico City), the ‘Dia de los Muertos’ carnival displayed with such verve was actually an intoxicating invention for cinema. No such event existed in reality. But it has since – by popular demand – been slotted into the city’s calendar, for visitors wanting to taste the reality of what they saw onscreen. In Mexico City, real life and cinema are so tightly entwined that one frequently influences the other.

amores perros, man on fire, mexico city, queer, romeo + juliet, spectre, y tu mamá también

Words by CHRIS LEADBEATER

September 4, 2024

hollywood authentic, venice dispatch, venice film festival, greg williams
daniel craig, drew starkey, jason schwartzman, luca guadagnino, queer

DISPATCH: DANIEL CRAIG QUEER
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS


Well before Bond, Daniel Craig impressed with his range and bold choices (which he then brought to the iconic franchise), but his raw, funny, vulnerable and ultimately transformative performance in Luca Guadagnino’s fever-dream adaptation of William S Burroughs’ autobiographical Beat generation novel is masterful and deserving of awards nominations.

Paying a boozy heroin addict in desperate love with a young man (Drew Starkey) in fifties South America – Queer impressed and shocked in equal measure when it premiered at Venice Film Festival in the main competition. Burroughs’ explicit book translates into a trippy, romantic voyage with erotic sex scenes in the hands of Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes and Guadagnino, showcasing Craig at the height of his powers as he cruises the streets of Mexico City and struggles with all of his character Lee’s addictions: love, lust, drugs, the search for a higher plane…  With costumes by Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson, an anachronistically cool soundtrack (Prince, Nirvana, New Order) and gorgeous sets built in Rome’s famed Cinecittà Studios, Queer is a sensory delight that asks questions about love, life, death and everything in between. Little wonder it was snapped up for distribution by A24. ‘If I wasn’t in this movie and I saw this movie, I’d want to be in it,’ Craig says of the project. ‘It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there.’ 

Though he’s known Guadagnino for years and wanted to work with him ‘for a long time’, Queer finally offered the opportunity for collaboration. Craig and Guadagnino worked together in the key casting of Starkey as former US-serviceman Allerton, the locus for Lee’s attention. They saw the Outer Banks actor early in the process and returned to him despite seeing hundreds of other potentials. Required to dance with each other throughout the film – physically during a trippy sequence in the Amazon, as well as emotionally and sexually – Starkey and Craig worked together for months before production on choreography and movement to nail the connection between the two men.

‘There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set,’ Craig told journalists when he arrived on the Lido. ‘You’re in a room full of people watching you. We just wanted to make it as touching and as real, as natural, as we possibly could. Drew was a wonderful, beautiful, fantastic actor to work with, and we had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.’

The resulting scenes are striking as much for their eroticism as they are for their tenderness, with Craig bringing a moving sensitivity and humour to his portrayal of a man who is light years away from the assured swagger of James Bond – even if Guadagnino does have him sip a cheeky vodka martini (or two) during one drunken scene in a hat tip to his most recent role. ‘One of the characteristics of the great actors that you love and see onscreen and are affected by, I would say is the generosity of approach, the capacity of being very mortal onscreen,’ Guadagnino said at the Venice press conference. ‘Very few are, and very few iconic legendary actors allow that fragility to be seen, and one of them is Daniel.’

daniel craig, rachel weisz

Queer is released in cinemas later this year
Read our review here


September 3, 2024

daniel craig, drew starkey, jason schwartzman, luca guadagnino, queer

Words by JANE CROWTHER


Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino returns to another beloved book with an intense gay romance at its centre with Venice Film Festival buzz-generator Queer; adapting’ Beat icon Wiliam S Burroughs’ unfinished autobiographical novel tracking his time in Mexico City and South America during the fifties. Starring Daniel Craig as ‘gentleman of independent means’ and heroin addict, Lee, as he wrestles with love for a young man (Drew Starkey) who ‘obliges’ him with sex, Guadagnino puts his particular swoony stamp on Burroughs’ raw, explicit prose. 

Divided into chapters and crafted from Queer and other Burroughs’ works as well as aspects of his real life, Queer begins with Chapter 1: How Do You Like Mexico? – a portrait of crumpled, mezcal-swilling ex-pat Lee as he looks for love in gay scene bars alongside his unlucky friend Joe (Jason Schwartzman, a rumpled delight) and the so-called ‘green lantern boys’. While outwardly he seems to be having fun as he lurches from bar to bar and picks up men, Lee searches for something more profound. As he listens to the hapless Joe’s misadventures with hook-ups, Guadagnino has him flicker transparently like a ghost, becoming insubstantial, incomplete. He wanders the streets in slow-mo soundtracked by Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ (linking Lee’s sensitivity to Cobain’s as well as their shared drug of choice) and takes one night stands back to a seedy motel that looks like a Hopper painting.

daniel craig, drew starkey, jason schwartzman, luca guadagnino, queer

It’s during these boozy wanderings that his eyes meet over a cock fight (of course) with handsome ex-US serviceman Allerton. An experienced cruiser, Lee is tilted off-balance by Allerton – a man whose sexuality he struggles to read and who makes him a blushing, awkward, giggling suitor. The duo hang out, watching Jean Costeau’s Orpheus and drinking until Lee can bear the tension no more. In a speech lifted directly from the text, Lee confesses his ‘proclivities’. Allerton, as slinky as a big cat, agrees to accompany him home and a complex love affair begins that starts with an erotic sex scene and travels to Ecuador and the Amazon jungle for hallucinogenic drug trips and dark nights of the soul.

That Daniel Craig can do more than Bond is well established but his performance here might startle those most comfortable with him in impeccable suits seducing women – and Guadagnino gives him a couple of cheeky vodka martinis to sip on in a nice nod to his famous role. But this is Craig flexing all his career muscles; sozzled and soulful, vulnerable and nuanced, he paints a universal portrayal of the lovelorn, the disconnected. There’s a delightful pathos and humour he brings to scenes where he begs Allerton to meet him halfway in running headlong into love and lust. And in sexual moments he radiates a tenderness and yearning that gives greater depth to scenes tabloid newspapers will no doubt have a field day with.

daniel craig, drew starkey, jason schwartzman, luca guadagnino, queer

Building out on Naked Lunch’s centipede as a motif, the drugs trips of The Yage Letters and the author’s thoughts from his Last Words, as well as incidents from his real life (his wife’s accidental shooting is represented in party tricks and dream sequences), screenwriter Justin Kuritzes and Guadagnino create a lurid study of one man’s interior life. Filmed entirely at Cinecittà Studios, the locations are rendered in a vintage postcard feel that’s like a memory and the anachronistic soundtrack takes in Prince and New Order to give further elasticity to the idea of reality. This is a just a version of a fifties moment in time, intended to be like the magic mirror in Cocteau’s Orpheus or the high promised by Lesley Manville’s feral botanist who provides Lee and Allerton with the yage cocktail deep in the jungle; a reflection. ‘It’s not a portal’ she tells them. The same is true of Queer – it’s a comedy, a love letter, a travelogue, a heroin withdrawal account, a trip, a study of an artist… depending on your own proclivities.

daniel craig, drew starkey, jason schwartzman, luca guadagnino, queer

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Queer is in cinemas now