Drunken Noodles
A lingering embrace at an art exhibit gives Drunken Noodles one of its quietest, most affecting moments. Adnan and his longtime boyfriend, Iggie, hold each other, then go their separate ways. By this point, the film has found its footing in reality again, but the hug doesn’t neatly settle everything that has passed between them. It belongs in a film about gay relationships that understands how much can remain unresolved, even when love is still present.
Love and sex matter here, but so do friendship, solitude, and the difficulty of making a relationship last when the wider world so often fails to understand it or give it much weight. There’s nothing accusatory about the way the film looks at these men. Its honesty comes with empathy, and with a feeling for the complications of gay relationships rather than any urge to judge them.
At the center is Adnan, an art graduate student spending the summer apartment-sitting for his uncle in Williamsburg while interning at a small gallery. It’s a beautiful place to stay, and the film makes as much of its interiors as it does of the gorgeous outdoor settings. The actor playing Adnan is its strongest asset: effortlessly handsome, yes, but also genuinely good, able to make both easy attraction and difficult intimacy register.
To understand the distance between Adnan and Iggie, there’s a trip to the Hudson Valley. They have gone there hoping to spend some proper time together, though their relationship is already troubled. Since someone in their life died, six months have passed without them sleeping together. The love hasn’t disappeared, but their intimacy has ebbed. Against that strained, complicated dynamic, Adnan’s decision to go out on his bicycle seems a minor thing. It becomes the chance that brings another man into his life.
A blown tire leaves him needing help, and an older man stops. This is Sal, an artist known for BDSM-inspired needle art, whom Adnan meets in the Hudson Valley the summer before his gallery internship. Their encounter leads to sex, then to a conversation about art and bereavement. Sal talks about the partner he has lost. Around this connection, the boundary between what happens and what might be imagined starts to dissolve. It’s an unusual blending, distinctly this film’s own, and it works. By the following summer, Adnan is helping put together Sal’s exhibition.
His involvement with Yariel has a different charge. A delivery driver, Yariel first meets Adnan while bringing him food; when they encounter each other again in a park, the attraction becomes unmistakable, with something genuine underneath it. Later, Yariel arrives at the gallery carrying food and apparently hoping to arrange a date. Adnan is overwhelmed with work. What follows instead is a visit to the apartment, where Yariel brings friends for a hookup filmed from shifting angles, the bodies almost arranged as a succession of artistic poses. There are also suggestions that Yariel may quietly be a writer or an artist himself. Together, he and Adnan have chemistry that feels tender as well as physical, a marked contrast to Adnan’s relationship with Iggie.
The film doesn’t deliver these connections in that chronological sequence. Its three sections begin with Yariel, move back to the meeting with Sal, and reach further into the past for the time with Iggie. Raw desire gives way to a more considered, reflective affection, before we see a relationship whose spark is fading. The director lets these strands overlap like recollections, making time feel layered rather than linear. Whether the film is also working backward to reveal how everything came about is a question worth watching it to untangle for yourself.
That approach won’t suit every viewer. This is unmistakably an art film, with a poetic cadence and fragments of midnight encounters that can seem lived, imagined, or somewhere between the two. Yet its strangeness is unexpectedly soothing. Small discoveries and pleasures keep surfacing, much as they do in the sexual experiences on screen—or, really, in experiences familiar from our own lives.
For all its beauty, what stays with me is its attention to people who enter our lives and leave again, to what never gets a clean ending, and to the pieces memory refuses to let go. Drunken Noodles asks for a slower, closer look at ourselves, at one another, and at the unremarked moments in between. Understated, thoughtful, and sincerely felt, it finds its force without raising its voice. (7.5/10)