My initial reporting was correct. Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” had its original runtime drastically snipped down in the editing room, and it was done only very recently.
In a Vanity Fair interview, Venice Film Festival boss Alberto Barbera is asked why he thinks “Queer” still has no distributor, and his answer is absolutely fascinating:
It's not an easy film. It's very bold. I don't know if you are familiar with the book or not. It's a short novel that was published only in 1985, right after the death of William Burroughs. [..] The film is fantastic. I think it's the best film by Luca Guadagnino so far, and the performance of Danny Craig is absolutely outstanding. I think it's the performance of his life […] There were three versions of the film. The first one was more than three hours long. The second one was two and one half. The final version is two hours and 15 minutes. I haven't seen the last one, but the two versions I saw were really, really amazing.
It makes sense now. Guadagnino just kept editing the film until the bitter end. When it was announced, Venice’s website had “Queer” at 185 minutes, then it was again updated to 152 minutes, and now it’s 135 minutes. Last month, I wondered if Guadagnino was trying to make it more palatable for a wider audience.
What I find interesting is that there were three versions of the film, and that Barbera hasn’t even seen the final one. This also means that Guadagnino cut almost an hour from his originally intended version.
Guadagnino reconstructed Mexico City in Cinecittá, in Rome, and Barbera mentions how visually the film “is completely abstract” and “not realistic.” This film strikes me as Guadagnino’s riskiest and boldest statement. We’ll see if it pays off next month, that’s when it premieres at Venice.
“Queer” wrapped production in July 2023. The film stars Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Omar Appolo, Henrique Zaga, Andres Duprat, Ariel Shulman, Drew Droege, Colin Bates, and filmmakers Lisandro Alonso, David Lowery, and Michael Borremans.
Aslan is described as "he," with heterochromic eyes and red-striped face, a look Gerwig says was inspired by David Bowie. So this isn't a gender-swap. Aslan is still a male lion. He's just voiced by a 77-year-old woman.