BEAUTIFUL BOOZERS

REVIEWED - FACTOTUM: IN adapting the writings of the late Charles Bukowski, film-makers can be forgiven for not concerning themselves overmuch with structure or narrative tension - such things are rarely found in the boozy writer's clenched novels. But they should have some idea how to make a catalogue of casual debaucheries cinematically interesting.

Bent Hamer here succeeds triumphantly in that endeavour. Factotum, nominally adapted from the novel of the same name, but bringing in incidents from other Bukowski pieces, regards its characters with just the right blend of pity and esteem. Filmed in Minneapolis, though set in Anywhere, USA, Factotum casts an elegantly dusty light over proceedings that emphasises the carefully maintained atmosphere of decay.

Even the camera seems infected by the drunken lassitude all around. Hamer's most bravura sequence involves an endless single take, during which Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor stagger out of bed, vomit and exchange unpleasantries. After remaining still for some five minutes or so, the camera grudgingly - clutching its imagined head, perhaps - pans ever so slowly to its left. Everything else in this film is as amiably fuzzy-minded.

Dillon, who plays Hank Chinaski, a barely disguised version of the author, is less believably filthy than Mickey Rourke in Barbet Schroeder's Barfly, but in every other regard his performance is exemplary. Drifting from job to job and scheme to scheme, Hank, an unpublished writer of scribbled stories, comes across as a laughably hopeless genius. When considering his lovemaking with Jan (a dishevelled Taylor), his squeeze of the moment, he decides that "she took it like a knife that was killing her". It is to the credit of this eccentric, perversely charming film that the remark comes across as neither pretentious nor boorish.

Hamer has created the ideal vehicle for propelling a misunderstood comic writer - too long in the possession of corduroy jacketed students - back toward the limelight.