Men who pause: Deepanjana Pal on heroic masculinity on screen

The last place you’d expect to find James Bond, the epitome of conventional heroic masculinity, is in a Luca Guadagnino movie.

Not only does the director favour mood over plot and action, his lush storytelling adds an edge of queerness to even the straightest of situations. Yet, with Daniel Craig, who has had the longest tenure as James Bond (15 years), Guadagnino delivers one of his best films and draws out of Craig a career-best performance.

In the Oscar-nominated Queer, Craig plays Lee, a character modelled on the writer William S Burroughs, who wrote the novel of the same name, on which this film is based.

Lee is frequently seen with a drink, a gun and arm candy, but he is no queer James Bond. He’s unkempt, in crumpled suits, and has the air of a junkie.

Craig’s Lee is a predator, but one who inspires pathos as he hungrily pursues the glacially beautiful Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Seen through Guadagnino’s eyes and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s lenses, Starkey becomes a sculpted embodiment of desirability. Meanwhile Lee is the stuff of sweat, shivers and pathetic desperation.

Lee first sees Eugene on a street, as a cockfight rages. The raucousness of the cockfight, with its masculine posturing and violence, contrasts with the glide of slow motion as the two men’s eyes meet across the crowd.

It’s a clash of clichés. The dissonance of a romance trope in such a scene feels all the more pointed given that the two men are a gun-toting writer and a former soldier. Yet all the romantic and romanticised clichés land, and in fact feel poignant, because the men in Queer are shatter-patterns of loneliness.

They are held together by their longings and denial. As much as this is Lee and Eugene’s love story, Queer is also the saga of a man trying to outrun the truth about himself.

A fascinating companion piece to Queer is Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (1966), a restored print of which has been re-released in select theatres. Uttam Kumar plays Arindam Mukherjee, a solitary star trapped by his celebrity.

Ray underscores this idea of confinement with striking opening credits in which black lines reminiscent of film strips appear on screen before multiplying to first resemble prison bars and then swallow the negative space. The remaining blackness is revealed to be the subject of the film, the hero, his back to the camera.

This is a man who doesn’t want to be seen. He wants the adoration his persona commands, but his dark glasses work like a security detail, protecting him behind their black blankness.

The plot unfolds as Arindam decides to make a last-minute trip to Delhi, by train. On board, his brief encounters with passengers include an unexpectedly meaningful conversation with Aditi (Sharmila Tagore), the editor of a small feminist magazine. Ray and cinematographer Subrata Mitra use the mirror in the train bathroom to poetic effect in moments when Arindam is forced to confront himself, but can’t bear to meet his own eyes. (Wes Anderson tucked in odes to Nayak and these moments, in the train sequences in Asteroid City and The Darjeeling Limited).

The men in Nayak, as in Queer, are characterised by frailty, though Ray shows them none of the tenderness that Guadagnino offers. Like Lee, Arindam, plagued by nightmares and memories, tumbles into addiction. Like Lee, he is a lonely man who longs for connection and finds it briefly when his paths cross with a beautiful, young person who is unimpressed but intrigued by him. Ray’s film is chastely platonic (unlike Guadagnino’s) and steers clear of clichés, but the chemistry between Aditi and Arindam does contain frisson.

As heartbroken and heartbreaking as heroes such as Lee and Arindam can be, it is a relief to get a break from the alpha males who have taken over Indian popular cinema. The latest iteration is Chhaava, in which Vicky Kaushal plays the warrior-king Sambhaji (Shivaji’s son) in a performance made up of roaring, violence, and bits of Islamophobia.

How strange that films such as Queer and Nayak, despite belonging to other places and times, feel more insightful and responsive to the present day than the contemporary Indian mainstream hero, who has turned manliness into a parody of itself.

(To reach Deepanjana Pal with feedback, write to @dpanjana on Instagram)