by Hudson Moura
Drunken Noodles is at its most interesting when it treats queer desire as something fleeting, sensual, and difficult to contain within a conventional narrative. Written and directed by Lucio Castro (End of the Century, 2018), the film moves through a New York of art, casual encounters, poetry, sexual fantasy, and emotional uncertainty, often inhabiting a liminal space between what is lived and what is imagined. Its first two segments have a particularly distinctive texture: intimate, erotic, poetic, and slightly unreal, as if desire itself were reorganizing both the space and the people moving through it.
At the centre of the first segment are Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), a student temporarily taking care of his uncle’s gallery, and Yariel (Joel Isaac), a Latino food-delivery worker and poet. The gallery exhibits embroidered tableaux depicting explicit sexual encounters between men, almost like a naïve, queer Kama Sutra (featuring Sal Salandra’s real work), and these artworks continue to echo across the film’s different segments. Yariel’s response to them becomes one of the film’s most beautiful moments. While other delivery workers face the camera in portrait-like compositions, he speaks lyrically about love and about the fragile, ephemeral quality of the embroidered material. Poetry also recurs throughout the film, including verses by Li Bai, reinforcing the dialogue between bodies, art, fantasy, and desire.
The first two segments are where Drunken Noodles works best. Casual encounters, parks, anonymous sex, art, and conversation create a sensual queer New York suspended somewhere between reality and fantasy. Castro approaches gay male desire in a way that feels intimate and distinctive, neither conventionally romantic nor purely explicit. The second segment, centred on Adnan’s connection with the older artist Sal Salandra (Ezriel Kornel), preserves much of the same poetry and emotional ambiguity, and together these first two sections could almost sustain a film on their own.
The problem is that the later segments do not reach the same level of intimacy or narrative complexity. Silence, ordinary gestures, minimal dialogue, and narrative gaps initially create openness and mystery, but gradually begin to feel like absence. The third and fourth segments seem comparatively empty, leaving characters and situations underdeveloped and weakening the cohesion of the whole.
Drunken Noodles is therefore an intriguing but uneven film. At its best, Castro captures queer desire as something ephemeral, sensual, poetic, and imagined, moving between what is lived and what may only be fantasized. Unfortunately, the later segments never fully match the freshness, intimacy, and complexity of the film’s beginning.
Rating: 3/5