Being indispensable to a family can be a precarious position. In Diary of a Mad Old Man, Fan Bingbing plays Susu, a Chinese woman caring for her Japanese father-in-law while becoming the object of his sexual fixation. He depends on her attention. She depends on the household around him. Neither arrangement makes their relationship easy.
Directed by Wayne Wang, the film adapts Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel, with Lily Franky playing Utsugi, a widower left partly paralyzed by a stroke.
Wayne Wang, the film’s director, has approached the instability of male desire before. His 2016 Japanese-language film While the Women Are Sleeping, adapted from a Javier Marías story, follows a novelist who becomes absorbed in an older man’s practice of filming a younger woman as she sleeps. Its premise offers a useful point of comparison: looking at someone can become an elaborate substitute for understanding them. Diary of a Mad Old Man brings that question into a relationship where physical care makes distance difficult to maintain.
Here, the decision to make Susu Chinese adds another layer to the family’s imbalance. She belongs to the household through marriage, yet must also interpret its cultural codes. Speaking to Variety, Fan connected that position to her own experience working abroad: “When you enter another culture, you are always observing: how people communicate, what they don’t say, the relationships, etc.”
That observation gives Susu an existence beyond Utsugi’s attention. While he reads her behavior for signs of desire, she is reading the people around her to understand where she stands. Fan says Wang encouraged her to bring her own cultural instincts to the role, allowing that difference to remain part of the character.
Her approach to Susu’s sexuality is equally deliberate. In the Variety interview, Fan describes a woman aware of her attractiveness and entitled to that awareness. But knowing the effect she has on Utsugi cannot cancel the conditions under which she lives. “Financial dependence, family expectations, loneliness and unequal relationships still exist today,” she told the publication.
For Fan, the role follows a run of work with filmmakers across Asia, including Han Shuai’s Green Night and Chong Keat Aun’s Malaysian drama Mother Bhumi. Her performance as a spiritual healer in the latter earned her the 2025 Golden Horse best actress award.
Diary of a Mad Old Man, also starring Takumi Saito and Youki Kudoh, is selected for Busan and has joined the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Gala lineup. Across those festival appearances, its provocative premise will be easy to summarize. Fan’s account of Susu asks for something more demanding: attention to a woman whose motives remain her own, even when someone else believes he has understood them.
