‘Diary of a Mad Old Man’ Review: A Tepid Update of a Literary Classic

Given its premise — a post-stroke retiree derives sexual pleasure from his daughter-in-law — the perverse qualities of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s classic “Diary of a Mad Old Man” are plentiful. But by the standards of contemporary mores, the 1961 novel isn’t particularly explicit; in his first feature since 2019, Wayne Wang initially takes a different approach, showing retired Utsugi (Lily Franky) furiously masturbating under his desk before ruefully giving up in the first shot. Consciously redirecting Tanizaki for new aims, the film makes thoughtful textual tweaks throughout, but the final product is counterintuitively dull.

First-time screenwriter Kelvin Wyles follows the broad contours of Tanizaki’s text in the opening stretches while rewriting the novel’s first-person narration, deliberately softening the titular character’s selfish lucidity. The starting premise remains untouched: Utsugi is an intellectual retiree who, following a stroke, is solely motivated by lust for his daughter-in-law Satsuko (Fan Bingbing). With no expectation of sex, Utsugi instead avidly pursues toe-sucking access and voyeuristic glimpses of Satsuko in the shower, and spends a large amount on jewelry for her while withholding money from his children.

Because the film introduces Utsugi in classical Japanese dress and takes eight minutes to show any characters wearing modern clothing, it’s not immediately clear that we’re watching a present-day rendition. But soon the updates come fast, from small details — Utsugi bonds with Satsuko while passing her vape back and forth — to greater sentimentalization of the characters. Tanizaki’s novel gains force from its first-person narrator’s unapologetically conveyed self-knowledge: “[E]ven though I am sentimental and given to tears — as virtuous as that may sound — my true nature is perverse and cold-hearted in the extreme.”

While still uncomfortably horny, this film’s Utsugi is softened: A newly concocted story where he examines otherwise useless paper scraps brought to him by a crow he nursed back to health, describing them as “precious proof of love,” is both irreconcilable with and less interesting than the egoist of Tanizaki’s novel, who’s made pitiable only by age and his debilitated condition.

Wang has a great eye for maximizing production value. While limited primarily to the sets of a house, its outlying garden and an upscale bar cut off from all daylight, these nearly-all-interior worlds feel fully realized. (Exteriors and window shots place the film in Tokyo’s high-end Ginza district.) At age 62, Franky is meaningfully younger than his character but convincingly left-side-paralyzed throughout a performance that doesn’t lean into overstraining physical caricature. For her part, Satsuko is transformed from the novel’s fashionably dressed and gleefully exploitative figure to a more rounded character, complete with traumatic backstory conveyed via pensive monologue. This does not make her more interesting.

As the film introduces all-new narratives, a possibility the novel never explicitly addressed is implicitly foregrounded, especially in a late confrontation with Utsugi’s son: The old man isn’t an end-of-life patient with nothing to lose finally fully acting on his desires, but instead suffering from late-stage dementia. That makes Wang’s film less a study of late-in-life misplaced desire from a lifelong morbid personality and more a work in conversation with depictions of elder-adult dementia and related sexual urges in recent films like Yoshida Daihachi’s “Teki Cometh,” Sarah Friedland’s “Familiar Touch” and Lance Hammer’s “Queen at Sea.” With graying populations and elder care an increasingly prevalent concern worldwide, “Diary of a Mad Old Man” is assuredly on schedule in finding this new use for the novel’s title.

While the updated details remain thoughtful throughout, what’s been added to the previously lean narrative is turgid rather than transformative. To obtain the services of Fan Bingbing should be counted as something of a coup, casting which allows for subtextual frissons in two Japanese-Chinese relationships. Whatever the allegorical political/national possibilities, Satsuko’s relationships with both father and son are exploitation of a character from an impoverished background. None of these new wrinkles enriches or develops the text in new directions, as Tanizaki’s cold-blooded black comedy of malignant characters is replaced by Ozu-lite contemplations of death and long-take crying.