BRISBANE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: In Freddie Wong’s drifting existential drama The Drunkard, Taiwanese actor John Chang plays Mr. Lau, a literary author in early 1960s Hong Kong who barely has an audience for his work and thus little means of supporting himself. Moving from one tiny room to the next, he can barely be bothered to object to the deprivation of his talent. Friends and lovers quote back to him exhortations he once delivered about the struggles of Joyce and Proust, but now he just throws up his arms and reaches for the bottle.
Sitting at his desk, Lau’s mind wanders back and forth between a pulpy martial arts serial story plot – the kind of daily work that pays – and the idea for a novella, about Ernest Hemingway arriving in Hong Kong as a destitute young man and struggle for recognition despite the manuscripts in his possession. He’s too defeated to even sustain his bitter fantasies; Hemingway kills himself and the wuxia story carries on.
The writer lives in his mind, ruminating on what to do, and visitors are like interlopers who disturb his slow pickling. There’s never quite a sense of time passing in Wong’s adaptation of Liu Yichang’s acclaimed 1963 novel of the same name, a reflection of the work’s stream of consciousness format. The protagonist’s thoughts and work intrude on his depiction, with lines from the source material and Lau’s memories of the horrific events witnessed in Shanghai as a young boy during World War II. The point is not to trace his descent, but to distinguish the mix of pessimism and anomie that occupies a considerable mind when allowed.
'Don’t drink so much," friends, acquaintances and lovers – in the case of some women, all three at once – tell him, but Lau’s a productive alcoholic even if the quick fades Wong uses mid-sentence start to suggest the blackouts of a damaged mind. Lily (Elena Kong), a beautiful kept woman, suggests that he helps her out with a spot of extortion, which he does out of boredom more than necessity, but Lau’s personal compromises aren’t as easy as the professional ones. In another apartment he ends up bed with the lonely landlady, Mrs. Wong (Irene Wan), whose husband is working overseas, but he leaves her lest it becomes a relationship.
She takes it extremely badly, but Lau carries on, putting pen to paper and pouring another drink, and there’s an ambivalence to Wong’s depiction of the central character, an uneasy acknowledgment that should you fall for his soulful self-destructiveness there will invariably be a cost. Unlike, say, Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly, and its gritty belief in the surrogate Charles Bukowski and his milieu, The Drunkard has an underlying caution, even if the recreation of vintage Hong Kong that is muted colours and small location almost comes to suggest another memory, recalled from a distance.
Of course, the movies overtly suggested by The Drunkard is Wong Kar-wai’s interconnected In the Mood for Love and 2046, both of which owe more than a little to Liu Yichang’s work. Mr. Lau’s recounts a daydream where he imagines 40 years from now his work will still be used without a fee, but that he might get recompense 50 years on – a droll reference to Freddie Wong making an official adaptation as opposed Wong Kar-wai’s borrowing of inspiration. That doesn’t make The Drunkard a better film, as Freddie Wong, a former critic, has some interesting ideas, while Wong Kar-wai back then was a leading voice in world cinema.
Still, this an intriguing movie, flecked with anger and despair, and unafraid to pursue the bitter threads to their sad ends. In one home Mr. Lau is mistaken by the ailing matriarch for her long-dead son, who she longs to spoil. He plays along out of politeness at first, but then because he needs her gifts. But even as someone else he can’t help disappointing those close to him, and the woman takes her own life.
