Good Men, Good Women (Film)

1995. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.




Context:
Radical formal change: For the first time the majority of the shots use a mobile camera, including some elaborate plan-sequences, something which Hou had not done previously since most of his long takes had been (unusually for long-take directors) static. [See Udden chapter in Cinema Taiwan.]






Liang Jing is unresponsive to the excerpts of her own diary and cannot deal with a personal trauma in much the same way Taiwan as a whole cannot face up to the public traumas of its suppressed history,



"As with Three Times, some have misconstrued Good Men, Good Women as a simplistic excoriation of contemporary life (of malaise, disconnection, apoliticism) especially since its depiction of such is buffeted up against a more politically engaged moment in history. Yet Hou doesn’t retroactively honor activism; he’s interested in those people caught in the spokes of history rather than those who make grandiose gestures."


"The device of the faxes (one of the more forced allegorical gambits Hou’s ever offered), though reminiscent in some ways of the mysterious, accusatory videotapes arriving on Daniel Auteuil’s doorstep in Caché, doesn’t launch anything like Haneke’s wild goose chase investigation; the question here isn’t of motive. The silent thief who’s been harassing Liang remains anonymous right to the end, but Hou doesn’t seem to have much interest in teasing out his identity."

"For Liang to fully inhabit Chiang Bi-Yu and to understand Taiwan’s tumultuous legacy, need she come to terms with her own past? This isn’t a question Hou poses for his character, but for himself, it seems. There’s no such thing as reconciliation here, but there is doubtlessly a reckoning. In trying to find a way to adequately represent Taiwanese national identity, Hou discovers he might as well be asking the same of Taiwanese individual identity. That Liang Ching seems too fragile to withstand such scrutiny only makes her all the more appropriate as an avatar."
"As the camera roves around her dimly lit apartment (it could be early morning or mid afternoon, judging by the harsh light coming in through the drawn window shades), not following her exactly but catching her in crucial parts of the frame, we’re already treated to a slew of contradictory personality markers: Isabella Rossellini’s face peers out from a huge, framed Blue Velvet poster propped against the wall, certainly not foregrounded, but conspicuously there; the camera pans past Rossellini’s single, haunted eye and over to the television, which is playing a deceptively sunny scene from Ozu’s Late Spring, Setsuko Hara joyously riding her bicycle down a country street. Dichotomous images of actresses to be sure: which one represents Liang’s persona, if either? Hou would never be so gauche as to explicitly ask this, but as the film continues, and Liang’s identity is constantly split open and reframed (she’s a haunted actress in the present, in and out of period costume; a troubled, bar hostess and junkie in the recent past; a stoic medical student and political prisoner in the film within the film), we’re constantly searching for glimpses of individuality. Is she Rossellini’s bad-omen femme fatale or Hara’s good-natured, devoted daughter?" [http://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/585/good_men_good_women]