Fan Bingbing Sparks Carnal Desire Wayne Wang’s Diary of a Mad Old Man

Author-director Wayne Wang is back to carnal game playing as a catalyst for psychological mischief in Diary of a Mad Old Man, which stars Fan Bingbing and Lily Franky and is headed to a gala world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.  

Wang’s latest film centers on 69-year-old widow Utsugi, played by Japanese actor Franky (Shoplifters), whose body is failing after a stroke, even as his sexual drive remains strong. In an exclusive clip obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Utsugi, who depends on his daughter-in-law Susu, played by Bingbing, for care, receives stretching exercises to aid his recovery.

With Wang’s usual artful approach to erotic desire, a perspiring Susu then tells her father-in-law she will take a shower and will leave the door open — which Utsugi judges to be a possible plea for sex.

“Why did Susu say, ‘I’ll leave the door open’?” Was it an invitation? Or maybe a tease,” Utsugi writes in his private journal. He may be a “hideous” old man, Utsugi continues to write, but he can still attract beautiful women like his daughter-in-law without raising suspicions about erotic obsessions.

Never mind Susu may well have left the shower door open should Utsugi fall and call out for help. Wayne has cracked open his own narrative door for charged encounters between Utsugi and Susu to escalate, for the boundaries between seduction and projection, intimacy and manipulation to fall away, and Diary of a Mad Old Man to be a darkly comic take on loneliness, perversity and the search for deep human connection.

The indie drama has Beijing-based Rediance Films as its world sales agent, and CEO Meng Xie, in a statement, said he was “thrilled to embark on our first collaboration with director Wayne Wang, a pioneering figure in Asian‑American cinema whose impressive body of work spanning independent and studio films speaks for itself. Kicking off with its world premiere in Toronto and Asian premiere in Busan, we aim to bring this new‑era adaptation of a Japanese literary classic to wider global audiences.”

Wang’s erotically charged drama adapts Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s eponymous novel about an ordinary family home becoming an arena of forbidden desire. The Joy Luck Club director, in a statement, says of his movie adaptation: “This was his (Tanizaki’s) last novel written after he had a stroke in his ‘60s. The book takes on the form of a journal by Utsugi, an aging patriarch, who, recovering from a stroke, discovers that while his body is decaying, his libido rages on. As I approached my late seventies, I am constantly aware that I live in the shadow of my mortality. I find myself caught in an irony similar to Tanizaki, struggling between eros and the will to live.”

While in Toronto with Diary of a Mad Old Man, Bingbing will receive a Special Tribute Award at TIFF, which runs from Sept. 10 to 20.