An adaptation of Liu Yichang’s 1963 novel has been long overdue, not least because Liu’s books inspired two of the most highly celebrated Hong Kong films of all time, Wong Kar-Wai’sIn the Mood for Loveand 2046. Fans of those films will find themselves in familiar territory here.

Mr. Lau (played by Taiwanese actor John Chang) is a Shanghainese writer who moves to Hong Kong, bringing with him only violent memories of the war. He earns a meager living writing pulp kung fu novels and pornographic stories for newspapers, but he dreams of being a great writer and transcending his inconsequential existence through his art. However, the man we meet at the start of the film is already broken and beaten down. He’s lost faith in the transformative power of literature and spends every waking moment drunk.

We follow Lau as he drinks his way from one minor crisis to the next, getting kicked out of boarding houses and falling into tawdry relationships with the lonely women who inhabit his world. There are opportunities to put his life back on track, like when a young friend launches a literary journal and asks him to be the editor, or when his love life reaches a measure of stability and happiness. However, his alcoholism and the bloody past he recalls in frequent flashbacks combined with the economic realities of life near the bottom rung are enough to keep him in his downward spiral.

First-time director Freddie Wong is a veteran film critic, and The Drunkard plays a bit too much like a study in cinema. The colors are beautiful, the costumes immaculate and the shots linger on these haunted souls as they suffer through their maudlin existences. But while Wong Kar-Wai’s characters are silently heroic in their love, the characters here are irredeemable and shallow. Likewise, there is nothing to universalize his condition and so make him a truly tragic figure. Instead, we just see one more lonely man failing at life.

Hemingway and Dostoyevsky clearly influenced the characters in this film. Both men wrestled with existential crises but managed to create great art. Liu Yichang was also able to write enduring work, though the results, at least those seen in this adaptation, are not elevated to anything greater than a portrait of an interesting but broken man.

The Drunkard is available on DVD in Cantonese with English and Mandarin subtitles