NAKED LUNCH
In the zone
RELEASED OUT NOW! 1991 | 18 | Blu-ray (4K/standard) Director David Cronenberg Cast Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands
How do you film an unfilmable novel? William Burroughs’s cult 1959 book is really just a series of vignettes. A faithful adaptation would also be banned all over the world (chapter nine would do it…).
David Cronenberg’s solution: take elements from it plus earlier works like Queer and Junkie, then add aspects of the writer’s life (like the day he shot his wife dead in a drunken game), and a noirish thriller throughline. The result: a Brundlefly fusion of the author and the director’s sensibilities.
Thick with kink and deadpan black humour, the film drifts between reality and hallucination.
Peter Weller is author surrogate William Lee, who decamps to Interzone (an analogue of Burroughs hangout Tangier), recruited to infiltrate the drug trade. It’s a shame that, due to the Gulf War, location filming in Morocco fell through – it all feels very stage-bound. Otherwise, there can be few complaints.
Weller, a Burroughs fan who lobbied for the role, plays Lee with laconic detachment, aceing some classic routines. Key innovations (like a giant bug/typewriter that speaks through a sphincter-like orifice) are imaginatively grotesque. And the score is stunning, wedding Howard Shore’s orchestral compositions to Ornette Coleman’s squalls of improvised saxophone, to suitably strung-out/dissolute effect.
Extras A fascinating hour-long Weller interview sees the actor speaking eloquently and with great passion about his admiration for Burroughs (and sharing a wild acid trip story). “Naked Making Lunch” (55 minutes, 1992), is a solid TV doc which includes on-set footage and interviews with the author and director. Of four more interviews (62 minutes), only effects guy Chris Walas’s is of note. There’s also an hour-long talking head on Burroughs, a decent “visual essay” (28 minutes), and some score chat (31 minutes). An old Cronenberg commentary is rather sporadic, but informative enough to make a new critical track feel redundant. Plus: trailer; galleries; 80-page book; poster; postcards. Ian Berriman
Cronenberg and Weller later gifted the cat-loving Burroughs a Korat kitten (a grey pedigree breed). He named it Boy.