Thanatos, Drunk
醉•生梦死
Taiwan, 2015, colour, 2.35:1, 106 mins.
Director: Zhang Zuoji 张作骥.
Rating: 2/10.
Purposeless, repetitive drama set in Taiwan’s underbelly is as empty as its characters.
STORY
Taibei, the present day. Whenever Rat (Li Hongqi), who works at a market stall, visits his alcoholic mother (Lv Xuefeng), a former actress-turned-mama-san who lives by the banks of the Danshui River, she nags Rat to get a proper job and stop hanging around with Shuo (Zheng Renshuo), an underworld gigolo whom he looks up to and with whom he shares a flat. Shuo’s girlfriend, a club dancer, is Rat’s cousin. Rat’s older brother, Shanghe (Huang Shanghe), had earlier upped and left one day for the US; now he’s returned, after losing his boyfriend there. He stays with Rat and gets a job with a film company in Ximending district, urging Rat to cut down on his drinking and also find a steady job. One night, Rat rescues a mute young prostitute (Zhang Ning), for whom he has a soft spot, from a violent client, cutting him with a hooked knife he carries. The two gradually fall for each other. Meanwhile, Shuo finds his past catching up with him; he’s beaten up and also told that Rat will pay for the scar he caused. Back at the flat, Shuo has his wounds tended by Shanghe, who then starts coming on to him.
REVIEW
Opening with a quote from one of ancient China’s greatest boozy poets, Li Bai, Thanatos, Drunk 醉•生梦死 certainly lives up to its portentous English title, with the main character, a young Taipei punk called Rat, spending most of the time mooning around in an alcoholic haze and looking for trouble. As a film, however, this ninth feature by variable Taiwan auteur Zhang Zuoji 张作骥 is more accurately described by its Chinese title, a proverbial phrase meaning “purposeless” or “disoriented”. By slipping in some punctuation, Zhang puts more emphasis on the word “drunk”; but in all other respects this is a singularly pointless and repetitive movie that seems to make itself up as it staggers along.
It’s a big step back for Zhang (Ah Chung 忠仔, 1996; The Best of Times 美丽时光, 2002) whose films have always promised more than they deliver but whose dysfunctional family drama When Love Comes 当爱来的时候 (2010) and kids-in-summer A Time in Quchi 暑假作业 (2013) had shown him throwing off the self-conscious auteurism that too often hobbled his output (most notably in Soul of a Demon 蝴蝶, 2007). Not only is Thanatos, Drunk barely comprehensible at a narrative level, it also shows Zhang dealing with homosexuality for the first time, with the young punk’s gay elder brother returning from the US and falling for the punk’s flatmate, a charismatic underworld gigolo. The energetic bathroom scene that results is hardly convincing at any psychological level, even by the script’s loose standards of characterisation. Zhang seems much more at home in scenes between the young punk and a mute hooker he appears to fall for, or in those between the gigolo and his dancer girlfriend; these sequences have a slightly transcendental quality that recalls When Love Comes.
The four words that make up the Chinese title (drunk, life, dream, death) reportedly stand for the four leading characters: the alcoholic mother, the opportunistic gigolo, the gay elder brother and the rootless younger one – though Zhang’s throwaway script hardly makes this clear to the viewer. Performances are okay within their limitations, with TV/stage actor Zheng Renshuo 郑人硕 making the biggest mark as the preeny gigolo and newcomer Li Hongqi 李鸿其 okay as the young punk. Veteran Taiwan opera singer/director Lv Xuefeng 吕雪凤, who played the loud-mouthed first wife in When Love Comes, grandstands again here in a couple of scenes as the brothers’ alcoholic mum, though without engendering much sympathy. Technical credits are undistinguished, and editing is lax.
CREDITS
Produced by Simple View Production (TW).
Script: Zhang Zuoji. Photography: Xu Zhijun, Zhang Zhiteng. Editing: Zhang Zuoji. Music: Lin Shangde, Zeng Yunfang. Art direction: Zhan Zhengyun. Sound: Xie Huijing, Zhang Zuoji. Visual effects: Zhang Zhaomin, Wu Xinfei (Simple View Production).
Cast: Li Hongqi (Rat), Zheng Renshuo (Shuo), Huang Shanghe (Shanghe), Lv Xuefeng (mother), Wang Jingting (Shuo’s girlfriend), Chang Ning (mute prostitute), Lin Jinyu (Xiang), Jin Ziyan (boss lady).
Premiere: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama Special), 10 Feb 2015.
Release: Taiwan, 7 Aug 2015.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 11 Feb 2015.)