One of IndieWire’s Best Queer Films of the 21st Century was Lucio Castro‘s “End of the Century” from 2019, a slightly surreal will-they, did-they, won’t-they gay romance set in Barcelona. His follow-up film “After His Death,” about a woman (Mia Maestro) in freefall after an affair with an enigmatic musician (Lee Pace) who appears to quite literally have a cult following, premiered at the Berlinale and took Argentine writer/director Castro briefly out of the queer cinematic space.
But he’s back with another gay quasi-romance, this time in New York City, with “Drunken Noodles,” which feels like Apichatpong Weerasethakul directing an early ’80s New Queer Cinema indie. It has a lo-fi, shot-on-film aesthetic mixed with mystical elements, and it’s premiering in the Cannes Film Festival ACID parallel section later this month. (Standing for Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion, ACID is dedicated to elevating indie filmmakers.) Here, the mind-bending elements of “End of the Century” take on fuller force (and in a film that is not to mention quite sexy).
“Drunken Noodles” takes place over two summers, in both the city streets and the forest paths of upstate New York, as art student Adnan (Laith Khalifeh) has a series of unexpected, intimate, and even otherworldly, time-and-space-warping encounters. Watch the IndieWire exclusive trailer before the film’s Cannes premiere below.
Here’s the official synopsis: “Adnan, a young art student, arrives in New York City to flat-sit for the summer. He begins interning at a gallery where an unconventional older artist he once encountered is being exhibited. As moments from his past and present begin to intertwine, a series of encounters – both artistic and erotic – open cracks in his everyday reality.”
“In the summer of 2021, a friend introduced me to the work of Sal Salandra, an artist in his late 70s who had recently begun creating explicit sexual tableaux in needlepoint — a craft typically reserved for gentler themes, like kittens playing with balls of yarn,” Castro said as to the film’s origins in a press statement. “I was instantly captivated and went to interview Sal at his Long Island home, thinking I might make a documentary. However, I left feeling that what drew me to his work remained out of reach. I realized that what I wanted to explore couldn’t be articulated in a documentary, it had to be done through fiction.”
Joel Isaac, Ezriel Kornel, and Matthew Risch co-star in the film, which features cinematography by Barton Cortright, who most recently shot “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” out of the 2023 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
Watch the trailer for “Drunken Noodles” below. The film premieres at the festival in the ACID section Sunday, May 18.
The film is produced by Castro and Cortright under their Alsina 427 banner, with co-producers Joanne Lee and Julia Bloch, and executive producer Pierce Varous of Nice Dissolve. M-appeal is handling world sales. U.S. distribution is currently in negotiation and is expected to be announced shortly.
