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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Taiwan's filmmaking remains at a high level

Goodbye South, Goodbye, a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

By David Walsh
7 October 1996

Hou Hsiao-hsien makes some of the contemporary cinema's most beautiful films. The quality of this Taiwanese director's work ( A City of Sadness; The Puppetmaster; Good Men, Good Women) reminds one that the impersonal, albeit bombastic, drabness of most commercial films--many of which appear to have been turned out by a single sausage-making machine--is not by any means inherent in the medium itself.

Hou's latest work, Goodbye South, Goodbye, tells the story of Kao, a small-time criminal in present-day Taiwan, his pal, Flat Head, and the latter's girl-friend, Pretzel. They want to be rich and happy. A succession of get-rich-quick schemes, however, leads them only to the brink of disaster. In the course of the film the unsavory alliance between the underworld and the political elite emerges.

In a number of previous films, Hou has treated issues in Taiwanese history, particularly the character and consequences of the US-supported Kuomintang dictatorship, which ruled by martial law from 1949 until 1987. Here the filmmaker turns his attention to a generation cut off from traditional values but which can find no secure place in the new Westernized Taiwan. (This is an important theme as well in Edward Yang's Mahjong, also screened at the festival.)

Hou has written that "hot and humid" Taiwan, an "island in the south," is changing. "For better? Or for worse? Laugh at it? Or cry for it?" Kao wears green, he even sees the world as green through his sun-glasses. The colors of the forest and sea abound. But the world in fact is cold and corrupt, and the characters in this film are so unconscious that it is almost painful to watch them. For example, there is the scene in Kao's place following Pretzel's half-hearted suicide attempt. A public pool is just below his window. As the conversation grows heated--Kao is staggered by the fortune in debt Pretzel has run up--Flat Head simply leaps onto the window ledge like a cat and disappears out of sight into the water below. Later the same evening, Pretzel, with her one slashed wrist bandaged, cries as she plays video-games. This is Taiwan, the promised land of cellular phones and faxes, in which no real communication takes place.

Hou Hsiao-hsien's films are composed of a series of long takes--each with its own distinct feel--during which a static camera records the unfolding of events. In this film he has added equally long traveling shots--from a train; through the windshield of a car; of Kao, Flat Head and Pretzel on motorcycles. The director relies upon his camera, whether it is still or on the move, to patiently disclose the character of complex situations and relationships.

Hou has a remarkable ability to reproduce a given social milieu. The high point of the film is the sequence in which Kao's gangster boss and Flat Head's policeman cousin meet in a restaurant, along with their entourages, to negotiate the release of Kao and Flat Head, after the two have been seized by the corrupt cop. The scene's blend of almost feudal traditions and hierarchy, gangsterism and modern business practices seems to capture something essential about modern Taiwan.

Super Citizen Ko, directed by Wan Jen, is a further variation on a popular theme in Taiwanese films--the contrast between the idealism and capacity for self-sacrifice of the intellectuals of the 1950s and the selfish outlook of the present generation.

Ko I-sheng is an old man who spent sixteen years in prison for belonging to a left-wing study group and another eighteen years secluded in a nursing home. In his dreams he sees the face of Chen Cheng-i, a comrade whom he unwittingly betrayed under torture, causing his eventual execution. He leaves the nursing home in search of Chen's burial site. His daughter is bitter about the childhood she endured--her father's imprisonment, her mother's subsequent suicide. She says to Ko: "If you only lived for ideals, why did you bring me into this world?" Her husband is an activist of a new generation; to him, "Politics is just business." He gets arrested too, but for vote-buying and election fraud.

Ko finally finds Chen's grave. He begs the dead man's forgiveness. His life, he explains, has been thirty years of unrelieved sorrow and pain. "Those of you who possessed warmth and compassion were abandoned." Those of us who lived, Ko goes on, had virtually the same fate as those who died: life in a cold, dank prison. This powerful film gives the spectator a visceral sense of life under totalitarian rule.

In his first film, A Borrowed Life, Wu Nien-jen examined the influence of the half-century of Japanese rule on Taiwanese life. In Buddha Bless America, he turns to the American connection.

The story, told with humor and sensitivity, revolves around a peasant family in a small village in Taiwan in the late 1960s. The head of the family is a former elementary school teacher known as Brain. When the US army comes to town for a few weeks to carry out a training exercise, Brain convinces the villagers to cooperate with the Americans, much to their subsequent regret. Along with the GIs come bars and a gaudy new whorehouse.

Brain's younger brother has had two fingers severed at his job in a Japanese-owned factory. Certain that one day medical science would be able to reattach them, Brain has preserved the fingers in a glass jar. His confidence in the West, stemming from his admiration for its scientific and medical advances, suffers a blow when he takes his brother to the army hospital and is contemptuously turned away. He sets out to avenge himself on the Americans and makes off with two large boxes from the army base, which turn out to contain the preserved bodies of dead American soldiers. They are left by the roadside to be reclaimed and the next day the army moves out. Life returns more or less to normal for the village and Brain draws the conclusion that science can't solve everything, that some things are just left to fate.