It’s not hard to poke fun at North Brooklyn onscreen. Filmed around Greenpoint, Girls, Search Party, Broad City, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and High Maintenance satirized millennial ennui with barbed wit and glee. A genre unto itself, the borough has become synonymous with its own caricature.
Such lampooning contains truth, but it is rare to see Brooklyn depicted through a more genuine, non-John Early lens. Still hyper-gay, Drunken Noodles does just that.
Lucio Castro’s third feature follows Adnan (Laith Khalifeh) who lives in Williamsburg for a summer while interning at a local gallery. He doesn’t have much going on otherwise, leaving plenty of time for apartment hookups and cruising in McCarren Park. (Until a well-deserved screening shows there, you’ll have to cross the East River to see this film at IFC Center.)
Drunken Noodles is summery, dreamy, and gently surreal. A student at Bard, Adnan travels upstate and back to the city, finding fleeting but impactful connections along the way: with a food delivery guy, a soon-to-be ex, and an older artist. Sex abounds — none of it gratuitous, all of it honest and contemporarily male in an Andrew Haigh (Weekend, Looking) fashion.
Sex, in fact, is the vital thread connecting the film’s various vignettes. Castro argues it is a life-altering force; whenever Adnan gets some, he is transported to a new life chapter — and physical realm. After sharing the erotic pull Adnan’s grandfather had on him, his boyfriend replicates the grandfather’s pose one night in what is both a dream sequence and, somehow, utter reality. Elsewhere, in McCarren Park, Adnan finds a man cruising, grabs hold of a tree, and is immediately whisked to some other Edenic land — one even more verdant than our beloved park, without a luxury building in sight.
The film, like that setting, is a breath of fresh air.
