LIFF: Desires Revealed - Follies, Drunken Noodles, and Night Stage

Three films from Constellation: Leeds International Film Festival’s main programme of UK premieres, follow individuals and couples confronting their sexual desires.

Follies (Éric K. Boulianne, Canada, 2025)

Follies is a Canadian romantic comedy directed by and starring Éric K. Boulianne alongside Catherine Chabot, as François and Julie, successful but unfulfilled and sexless married parents who open their relationship up in an attempt to fix it.

Co-written by Boulianne, Follies is his directorial debut, having won multiple awards for his screenwriting. The script is top-notch, but Boulianne’s direction, the subtleness of the acting and the rawness of the sex scenes (the sound of suction during oral sex was something I don’t remember hearing in a film before), add up to something quietly masterful.

The couple fumble their way through first-time group sex, then dating separately. Each of their phone screens is shown as a split screen as they swipe through Feeld: “You’ve got a lovely penis, but I’ll pass.” François descends into a Feeld addiction, depression bubbling under the surface; masculinity in crisis. Eventually, he gets more than he bargained for when Julie, although reluctant at first, finds herself enjoying being with women both physically and emotionally.

Initially, the premise sounds like classic rom-com fodder, something Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell would star in, nonmonogamy as a punchline, something unattainably funny for couples sitting on separate armchairs. If the premise wasn’t made for streaming and pyjama-wearing and eating ice cream from the tub, it might be something darker and bleaker: nonmonogamy as a depraved catalyst for a couple on the verge of mutual destruction (the film even makes reference to Eyes Wide Shut when François gatecrashes a mysterious sex party). But Follies is different and asks the ultimate question: what if a film took nonmonogamy seriously? And even more wonderfully surprising, what do we do with the kids?

The opening scene sets this exploration of parents’ sexualities up. We watch François and Julie as they listen to an off-screen couple speaking at them about the cleanliness of rimming. With their two daughters always on their mind, babies’ bottoms sneak into the conversation. Suddenly, we’re not sure whether they’re talking about preparing an arse for licking or a baby for wiping. It’s hilarious.

A lazier film would keep the kids out of it, writing about sex and children not being a particularly easy task in increasingly puritanical media landscapes. Follies doesn’t necessarily advertise the inclusion of its two incredible child actors (who improvised!), the brilliant poster showing the couple at dinner with kinky attire drawn onto their bottom half under the table, but this exploration of parents’ sexualities is one of the film’s most refreshing aspects. When Julie tells the children point-blank over breakfast that they’re opening their relationship up, they seem utterly unfazed. Later, the parents are called into school to discover that one of their daughters has created her own polycule in the playground. In the Q&A with Boulianne, he revealed his own daughter appeared briefly in the film, right after a scene where he gets a finger up his bum for the first time. It’s exactly this unabashed attitude that makes the film so joyous.

​Dating app addiction, playground polycules and how men will do anything but go to therapy, Follies is a frank, funny and even life-affirming comedy, uninterested in binary sexualities, examining not just the consequences of repressing our desires, but how important our sexualities are to our happiness.

Follies

Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro, Argentina, 2025)

“We drank Coke, we ate, we came.” Named after the spicy, Thai, fried noodle dish the protagonist shares with a takeaway delivery driver, Drunken Noodles is the third feature by director and fashion designer, Lucio Castro, exploring similar themes of temporary intimacy.

In reverse chronological order, separated by embroidered chapter titles, the film follows Adnan, an art student staying for the summer in his uncle’s house and working part-time in a gallery displaying embroidered scenes of gay sexuality. The first vignette is spent with the aimless Adnan sleepwalking through the city, picking up strangers and developing a fleeting sexual relationship with Yariel, the man who delivers his food.

Nighttime is magical in Adnan’s world, sleepy and sensual. Yariel pursues Adnan on his bike, tyres lit up with multicoloured LEDs, inviting quick, wordless oral sex in a city park. But Yariel wants more than Adnan, and he vanishes into thin air, leaving only his noodles behind. In the next episode, earlier that summer, we’re in the lush greenery of a forest. Adnan’s tire has burst, and an old man living in the forest offers to mend it. They exchange a few words. He’s the artist whose work Adnan will be looking after (the ‘paintings’ are actually those of real artist Sal Salandra). They fuck.

Drunken Noodles is a film with interesting ideas that don’t add up, tasty noodles floating in a bowl of soup alongside a couple of batteries, and one scene in particular tasted a little off. When Adnan accidentally meets the artist who is assumed to have embroidered the chapter titles, they fuck, he stays there, and is taken one evening to a couple of deck chairs in the woods near the artist’s house. Adnan is asked to wait until ‘something’ happens. He becomes irritated. But something does happen.

What follows is a magical realist moment of pure cheese. One of Dorothy’s ruby slippers dangles from a tree, sparkling. Then, a faun appears, playing a recorder. The Wizard of Oz-Narnia crossover plays out in ridiculously obvious subversive fashion. The faun begins to suck the recorder off, then fucks the ruby slipper.

It’s clear Castro is interested in time and commands it well: temporary city living, fleeting intimacies with strangers, solitary hours spent creating art, and the unexpected, persisting impact of memories and early experiences. Gradually, as we let the film wash over us, we’re lulled into a surprisingly effective moment that offers a glimmer of answers in a revelation by Adnan to his partner.

Drunken Noodles is muddled - glossy and superficial at worst - but at its best, it’s an expressionistic portrait of memories resurfacing in even our most transitory intimacies and desires.

Drunken Noodles

Night Stage (Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembache, Brazil, 2025)

All the world’s a stage and we’re all incredibly horny. The second feature from Brazilian Berlinale award-winning duo Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembache is a horny noir that celebrates transgressive sexuality.

When stage actor Matias (Gabriel Faryas) meets ‘Discreet, 35’ on a dating app, all he expects is a quick fuck, but a one-night stand turns into an affair with complications as the mysterious stranger reveals himself to be the mayoral candidate, Rafael (Cirillo Luna). Their sexual attraction to each other develops into pure hunger as they enjoy the thrill of being caught, fucking in riskier and riskier situations. The affair is further complicated by Matias’ housemate and co-star, Fabio (Henrique Barreria), who lands a TV role that the success-hungry Matias would do anything for.

Night Stage opens in the theatre with Matias and his cohort performing an experimental, highly choreographed play. Wearing a costume of scarlet red trousers and a sheer, nude top, he looks knowingly into the camera. This is a protagonist hungry for fame, for success, for attention. When the co-lead in the play, Fabio, is offered an audition for a big TV show shooting in their city, Matias is horrified and they both go to extreme means to fight for the part, with Matias even turning up to an audition in a ‘straight’ outfit (a hoodie instead of a crop top) to fit what he’s told is the role of a ‘hearthrob’.

Night Stage, as its title suggests, is about performance: the performance of identity, sexuality, and desire. Two men, revealing their desires under the cover of darkness. Stilted dialogue, an overbearing string score, and sets as artificial as a theatre stage, with a clunky, often-times ridiculous but incredibly fun plot, Night Stage is Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake as a soap opera tinged with 90s neo noir. The erotic thriller has always been a very heterosexual genre more concerned with punishing transgressive sexuality than embracing it, but refreshingly, Matias and Rafael are allowed to fuck wherever and however they want, even up until the final act.

In one of the couple’s forays into outside sex, they fuck crouched on the ground next to Rafael’s car as a family with a young child pulls up next to them. And that’s not even the climax. Less a whodunnit than an everyone doing it, Night Stage is a film caught between seriousness and frivolity; a loose, playful film, rough around the edges but with a real, transgressive heart.

Night Stage