Drunkard Nursing Home

(Nian bei jing bu fen di qu bu fen qing nian sheng huo zhuang kuang guan cha bao gao, Shuai Zhang, China, 2023)

You hear talk of an independent, no-budget Chinese documentary shot on digital video, titled Drunkard Nursing Home, edited down from ten hours of material. What kind of film do you instantly imagine?

Personally, at least, I imagine a film in the style of Wang Bing: a relentless, extended, fly-on-the-wall record of the appalling conditions in some downtrodden, state medical facility.

But the title (the English-language release title for festivals, at least) is, in fact, the name of a Beijing nightclub – one that has ceased operations just before filming starts – and the disaffected social set that gravitates around it.

Shuai Zhang’s chronicle follows a number of denizens of this underground as they drift around individually and collectively, looking for (and speculating upon) a new cultural ‘scene’. The post-punk music they love proclaims slogans of resistance and revolution, but what we see is the groping for a sustainable lifestyle familiar from much youth culture worldwide.

That lifestyle, in this case, involves queer sexual identity, drugs, ephemeral relationships, patched-together fashions, weighty discussions of art and theory, the tasting of foods, and copious amounts of alcohol.

A rough translation of the title reveals the lightly Situationist flavour of the enterprise: An Observation Report on the Living Conditions of Some Young People in Some Areas of Beijing.

Zhang is very much an insider of this world: as part of the roving gang, he frequently makes evident the act of filming and its effects.

The portrait of a dissolute but not entirely unhappy generation, Drunkard Nursing Home offers unvarnished authenticity.

© Adrian Martin 23 December 2022