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Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
One of Cannes' Sexiest, Queerest Films Is Lucio Castro's Mystical Art World Odyssey ‘Drunken Noodles' — Watch Trailer
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). More from IndieWire ADVERTISEMENT '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. ADVERTISEMENT 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. Best of IndieWire Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Telegraph
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
After this Death: This weird romantic mystery is curiously spellbinding
After This Death is an odd, alluring tale of strangers finding each other, obscurely changing each other, then pulling apart. It's an unresolved romantic mystery that's hard to categorise, and for a probable majority of viewers it will be too oblique by half. That said, it's itchy and interesting: I want to see it again. All the same points could be made more fulsomely about Lucio Castro's previous film, the exquisite, Barcelona-set gay love story End of the Century (2019). Set in upstate New York, After This Death has a vibe as autumnal as the earlier film was summery; it's in English rather than Spanish; and involves a fling between members of the opposite sex. What unites the films is Castro's open-ended, keenly curious sensibility, which can make ephemeral connections feel like the key to all life. Isabel (Mía Maestro), a voice artist from Argentina, is serenely alone in a cave, where she has paused during a solo woodland hike, when Elliott (Lee Pace) stumbles upon her. She's visibly pregnant, and by strange coincidence the due date is the same as his birthday. The baby's father, Isabel's husband Ted (Rupert Friend), is a distant character away on business, who we don't meet for some while: their relationship seems open, but it's unusual for Isabel to show such overt interest in another man. Elliott is quite a catch, to be fair: a shaggy-haired underground rock star with a small but terrifyingly intense cult following. Pace, exploiting his height nicely as an unabashed frontman, has charisma to burn in the role, but etches him with swaggering narcissism, too. That isn't a deal-breaker for Isabel, who accompanies her in-the-know friend Alice (a fetching Gwendoline Christie) to a gig by Elliott's band, who go by the obviously pretentious name Likeliness Increases. Even though Isabel doesn't rate their dirge-like music whatsoever, she's perfectly happy for Elliott to give her oral sex in the car park afterwards. The pair's ensuing affair is broken off when Elliott disappears, causing Isabel to be stalked by his most obsessive fans, as the film tips ever so briefly into thriller territory. The moody solemnity of all this is faintly absurd, but rather beguiling, precisely because it feels so out of time, so non-cutting-edge. We could easily mistake Castro's story for being set in the early days of internet message-boards, until we spot a stray laptop or phone to disabuse us. If the plot made any bids for strict plausibility, it would collapse, because it relishes too many spooky coincidences that are just that. While the lovers talk about Hitchcock in one scene, the film is a long way from actually behaving like one of his. It's about a funny range of things: looking for hidden messages in song lyrics, when they very possibly aren't there; feeding internet fandom with self-consciously mysterious gestures; dissatisfaction and a desire to make art, even if it's weird, and it's unclear if even the artist understands it. Maestro, who puts her lovely singing voice to use, presents us with a character who's impulsive, confused, and looking for something, beyond Elliott, that she probably couldn't name. There's no denying that the final drift is wispy and incomplete, but I was quite spellbound.
