Good Men, Good Women

I was introduced to Hou Hsiao-Hsien by Flowers of Shanghai, an exquisite piece of work that spoke of a mature film maker, who had mastered his visual language. I imagine that it would be a similar experience to an introduction to Wong kar Wai or Almovodar with In the Mood for Love or All About My Mother, respectively being pieces where an good director became a great. You finish these types of films wondering where did he (the director) come from intellectually, and where is he going.

Hou's style is subtle, an excellent cinematographer and picture taker, like many of the Asian films (whether this is from a common thread or by accident I don't know). He is not as overtly stylish as Wong Kar-Wai, but the shots he takes and chooses (perhaps the better adjective) are beautiful.

A previous commentator called this style "cinematic masturbation", which I think is an adolescent argument. Just because the points don't hit you over the head doesn't mean they are not being made. This is a political film, dealing with a still sensitive topic. The director definitely cares about the audience. Like anything else, it's the little details that count.

One of those little details is an Ozu film being played on TV in one background shot. Hou has consciously acknowledged Ozu as an influence and his style shows it. The action, so to speak, takes place within the context of the everyday events. The points being made are observed by the routine actions, and unique touches within them.

The most solid point being the commonality of loss, and tragedy between two Taiwanese actresses of different generations. Both lose lovers, and sacrifice children to the events around them.

The other point is the simultaneous affluence and emptiness is modern day life. The actress in the older story is based on a real person, who joined the anti-Japanese resistance in China during WWII. After this, her husband is executed in an anti-communist crackdown in Taiwan. She is both pushed along by events, but shows a determination to live her life and make decisions, This is in contrast to the other story, that of the actress playing (there is a movie within a movie), who is looking back on a life with petty gangsters, drinking and drugs. In material goods she is richer than the older actress ever was, with her upper middle class life, yet poorer in far more many ways. Both are played by the same actress, who handles the two stories well.

In the Hou portfolio, I prefer this to Goodbye South Goodbye, which I felt got a little lost in fancy camera work, but I feel that this is close to Flowers of Shanghai.

It's cinematic masturbation (my term). That's not the same as intellectual masturbation, mind you. It's not that his films are pretentious, per se. Cinematic masturbation is when the filmmakers have no real desire to share their ideas, thoughts, and motives with the audience. It's all done for their own satisfaction. This is opposed to most other filmmakers, who practise cinematic intercourse, by which they call for the audience to participate in their films emotionally and/or intellectually. Hou's not the only cinematic masturbator. Jean-Luc Godard is another one, though nowhere near the level of Hou. I love Godard, but he has a tendency not to let his audience in on what his motive is (and, yes, artists, filmmakers most of all, should have a motive), especially in certain periods of his career. Tarkovsky's Mirror is another maturbatory film - it's far too incomprehensible to anyone who's not Tarkovsky. This is definitely a value judgement. Masturbation, especially on film, is extremely narcissistic. Frankly, it's unfair. Art is primarily for the audience, not the author. Otherwise, there is no point in it.

Take Good Men, Good Women. It's not a bad movie, really. Certainly not Hou's worst. Its main claim to greatness is its excellent cinematography, with some sections in a high-contrast black and white and others in brilliant color. Hou also decides to move his camera a bit and film from different angles. He's finally caught up with D.W. Griffith, although he still falls back on his favorite compositions again and again. The narrative is often great - there are several great individual scenes - but it's ultimately too difficult to follow, which is the exact same complaint I had of my (currently) favorite Hou film, City of Sadness. The plot of Good Men, Good Women revolves around the life of a famous Taiwanese actress (a real person; the film is dedicated to her) and, in the more modern section of the film, an actress who is apparently going to play this former actress in a film about her life (her story is broken into two different time periods). This made sense after I read up on it, but it was really confusing when I was watching it. I assume the same actress played both parts. It's confusing because Hou doesn't want to stress anything: characters are introduced with their backs to us or when they're in shadows. How does he really expect us to recognize and latch onto his characters? He just doesn't care. No, that's not it. It's that he doesn't want us to do so: some pretentious notion that a confusing movie is an artistic one.

If I were to see this film again, I might find it better. It's still cinematic masturbation. If the audience, after reading up on it or seeing it several times, then understands it, well, it only becomes mutual masturbation. Satisfying, but wouldn't you much rather be f*cking?

Hou's concept is an interesting one: instead of a straight linear narrative either about the White Terror period in Taiwanese history or about an actor with a dead gangster boyfriend, he overlaps the two, and adds a further layer by putting the gangster a couple of years ago, and the actress now getting ready to act in a historical film about the White Terror, while being bugged in the present by somebody who sends her faxes of a stolen diary about the gangster, and calls and breathes into the phone. Hou isn't trying to spoon-feed us, and that's admirable. He is also allowing us to ponder complex inter-historical relationships. But the effect of the spliced layers is jarring and doesn't always work. Another DVD reviewer (like me), John Wallis, of DVD Talk, has already commented that he "could not see how the film about the White Terror atrocities affected the actress in any way -- other than it made her lamenting over her lost boyfriend and soiled past seem pretty trivial." Is it that bad? Nick Schrager and Aquerello have offered the interpretation that after the gangster boyfriend's death, Liang Ching, the actress, is guilty of a " betrayal of his memory during her subsequent years as a drug-addled bar hostess." Schrager concludes that "The implication, as subtle as it is powerful, is that Liang's struggle to come to grips with her own disloyalty reflects modern-day Taiwan's attempts to confront (and accept) its own shameful past persecuting communists." Aquerello puts it that "Liang's betrayal of Ah Wei's memory is a modern day, personal manifestation of a national, historical event: the seemingly random persecution of Taiwanese people by their own government during the White Terror." That's a nice idea, but in fact Liang was a drug-addled bar hostess while involved with Ah Wei (Jack Kao), the gangster; when they have a discussion of her pregnancy while caressing in front of a mirror -- a stagy but compelling scene many writers have commented favorably on -- she points out that being a bar hostess, she has slept with many men, and she doesn't know for sure who the father is. ("Still, I'd like to see a little Ah Wei," says Ah Wei, rather lamely.) The guilt is not so clear. What is clear is that Liang Ching has had an unsavory past, and that her dissolute life has been a far cry from the dedication of the brave revolutionary she is going to portray on screen.

What is also clear (though the Fox Lorber DVD tonal quality is mediocre, particularly in the black and while segments) is the idealism of the Taiwanese nationalist fighters, who go to China to fight the Japanese who have been oppressing them but then after the war is over, are systematically exterminated (in a policy designed to please America, by the way). Some of these scenes, such as one where one person after another is briefly interrogated, have an arresting and somehow heartrendingly tender vérité quality, as does the scene where female fighters are taken from a prison room to be executed. There is a wealth of beauty in the film, even when the present-day sequences seem most contrived and boring, like a gangster dinner with city contractors just before Ah Wei's shot.

It is also true as Acquerello says that, "As Liang becomes the entrusted emissary for the story of Chiang Bi-Yu's struggle, she gradually becomes the generational conduit between Taiwan's turbulent past, and the decadent, uncertain future." That's about all we can say; what Hou means by this linkage is hard to guess, and perhaps only meant to be pondered, without any conclusions being drawn.

Howard Shumann has written a typically clear and informative review of "Good Men, Good Women" for Cinescene that clarifies the general structure and historical references of the film. My own reactions are quite different, however. I wouldn't be as extreme as the IMDb commenter who has called Hou's film-making "cinematic masturbation," or use the language of Sam Adams of the Philadelphia City Paper (2002) who calls "Good Men, Good Women" "a confused exercise" and suggests it's self-indulgent. But I have to agree with Adams that, "Good Men feels so arbitrary that its closing-title dedication — to the victims of the anti-Communist purges of the 1950s — is almost shocking; it's hard to believe the director could take a subject that seriously and make a film this self-indulgent." The shifts from the present-day actress's discomfort and her flashbacks to life with Ah Wei to the historical film-making never seem predictable. Some might find that intriguing; to me is merely seems arbitrary and random.

"Good Men, Good Women" is far more multi-layered and ambitious than a purely present-day musing like "Millennium Mambo" (despite the latter's tacked-on comment that the voice-over occurs ten years later). But the randomness of the splicings makes the implied relationship questionable, even frivolous. Hou may be better off separating his historical treatments from his modern ones, as he does quite simply with three segments in his recent "Three Times."

Director Hsiao-hsien Hou seem to be fascinated with the disconnected newer generations in contemporary Taiwan, including it in other films like "Goodbye South, Goodbye". In this film, he takes on the period after the Nationalist retrieved to Taiwan and parallels it with the modern day, putting one story in another as a story which the film is to be based on within a film. In both stories, it is about the turbulent times in which the people as a whole act self destructively, either doing what they think is right as in the Nationalist government or due to their disassociation with the rest of society. The anonymous faxes in the modern period seem to be an indication that incidences either swept behind or intentionally forgotten will come back to haunt you until the issue is confronted. A message that the brutality that happened after the Nationalist's arrival in Taiwan should not be forgotten or ignored, but should eventually be dealt with.

This is a movie that bravely confronts issues in a country that is too preoccupied with trying to juggle for positions in the global market. A reminder to everyone that a country's history does not consist of only the valiant highlights, but also of shameful past that should not be discarded.

A film about time and isolation and loss on a personal level, and on a national level, too; the Taiwanese patriots in the film-within-a-film cannot even speak Chinese--Taiwan having been a Japanese colony since 1895--so they are strangers to the motherland and strangers when they return home. The personal story glides seamlessly into the political. Endlessly moving, and only slow if you cannot feel Hou's deep compassion and depth of understanding. Why is this film maker not celebrated everywhere?