In his trilogy of novels about the adolescence and adulthood of a young man closely modeled on himself, Edmund White distilled to its essence what it means to discover your sexual and artistic identity at the same time. Indeed, in White’s imagination, these two discoveries are not only simultaneous, but contingent upon one another. Just as in White’s The Bitter Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, Lucio Castro’s new film Drunken Noodles is centered on the kind of open-hearted discoveries made by an extremely horny young man who has just moved to a new place. Graduate school art student Adnan (Laith Khalifeh) is in New York City for the summer to intern at an art gallery. While there, he’s living at his (presumably wealthy) uncle’s apartment by himself. His arrival features the kind of mundane procedures you’d expect. He has to piss right away, the cat hides behind the bed, and he orders Thai food. At night, he also goes cruising in a nearby park, the location of which he sees on a digital map in a Sniffies-like app as hives of potential gratification.
Drunken Noodles doesn’t suffer from White’s internalized homophobia. Adnan is hungry for sex, but he isn’t ashamed of it. His first hookup is with a stranger, a quick blowjob that he doesn’t ask to be reciprocated. On another night in another park, he meets up with one of those food delivery drivers, who brings him dinner and jerks him off behind the monkey bars. The driver, Yariel (Joel Isaac), is different from the first guy. Perhaps his exoticism is more enticing (he speaks Spanish), or maybe it’s his light-up bicycle, which Adnan takes for a brief spin. Something tethers them to each other, to the point that Adnan keeps ordering food directly from him. Yariel comes to the gallery one day, where he sees a new collection of erotic, needlepoint art by an apparently unknown artist named Sal, whose work Adnan personally helped bring to the gallery.
While the film maintains a light atmosphere, thanks to a piano-forward score reminiscent of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, its images contain real fantastical depths. In this, the first of four chapters, the viewer explores those depths when Yariel and his delivery driver friends show up to Adnan’s apartment at night to instigate an orgy. Rather than a frolicking romp, their sex is purely representational, a series of poses in tableau under the sharp chiaroscuro moonlight pouring through the windows. Eagle-eyed viewers might recognize in their improbable poses the same compositions as Sal’s needlework from the gallery. Playful and provocative, they’re not unlike Drunken Noodles itself.
The following three chapters unfurl in similar ways, and their surprises are worth preserving. Simple and seemingly self-contained, they could just as easily be standalone short stories, though their connections point to Castro’s interest in surprising his audience and making them do a little searching. Throughout, though, the enigmatic Adnan begins to open up to us. His sexual proclivities, for instance, find shocking though ultimately innocent origins in a childhood fascination with his grandfather. Later, a mysterious, nighttime encounter with his grieving boyfriend is the kind of spark someone who has been in a long-term relationship for might simultaneously yearn for and fear; an injection of mystery and danger in the everyday act of sex that leaves your chest heaving and your head spinning.
As with his first feature End of the Century, Castro is interested in making the viewer work a little harder than normal to figure out where — or when — they are in time and space. Drunken Noodles, unsurprisingly, is at its most pleasurable in those moments, like the orgy, in which reality and fantasy intermingle. Not interested in clear delineations, Castro has a knack for making the mundane immediately feel fantastical, and injecting the chaste with a sudden dose of sex. It’s a quality desperately missing from most cinema today.
DIRECTOR: Lucio Castro; CAST: Laith Khalifeh, Matthew Risch, Joel Isaac, Ezriel Kornel, Céline Costa; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS: June 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 21 min.
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