© 2015 by James Clark
Rather than immediately follow upon the overture that was the business regarding Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (featuring a hit man), in the form of introducing links like Michael Mann’s Collateral or his Manhunter (featuring a “Tooth Fairy”), we’re going to make a brief hop over to Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996). There was an intriguing affinity to the goings on in Melville and Mann, in Hou’s Millennium Mambo with its premium upon a slippery process between right-hand self-possession and left-hand slacking off. And this seems the right point in our deliberation to consider how the deft Taiwanese master (the latest film of which, The Assassin [2015], brims with unusual promise) comes to grips with the love/hate paradox we need all the help with we can get. More particularly, we want some perspective upon the very sophisticated dialectic Melville and Mann find to be crucial, in view of the apparently far simpler harmonics Hou Hsiao Hsien settles upon so glowingly.
Here we especially key upon Hou’s apparently having no time for the tempered subversiveness the Occidental Two (Three, if you count Antonioni) broach, albeit from afar. The latters’ loner’s creed igniting their films with hardness many find repellent is nowhere to be found in Goodbye South, Goodbye. Instead we have a protagonist, Gao, having made a business partner of a younger brother, Flatty (or Flat Head), who, to put it mildly, has no aptitude for business life or any other form of adult comportment. Flatty’s girlfriend, Pretzel, supposedly adding to a going concern, is infantile to the point of emotional derangement and a suicidal cipher. The brothers had left their southern Taiwan, rural homeland to contest cooler atmospheres. Wanting no part of a tacky family distribution of a relative’s estate, they had pointedly told those hicks that they were above that. In the course of the film, Flatty’s default position, after a string of less than stellar start-ups, is to go for his share of that long-settled disbursement, citing his in fact having put in a bid however ridiculously late. Being told to get real in the most oblique way (a secondary family member and violent gambling addict having horned in on the loose cash), the one who should have remained a village idiot presses for confrontation and, once there, gets punched out by the mob of marginal loved ones who had long-ago squandered that abstraction, a network including a local cop. This prompts the bad-tempered moron to look for a gun and Gao, the boss man with few leadership qualities, makes some calls to this effect, calls that are bugged. The boys are taken for a long ride into wasteland where corpses would never be found. However the family includes a political boss of the area who counsels directing the city slickers back to Taipei. On the way home Flatty runs their car off the road and Gao is killed.
Though it’s unlikely there would be a family funeral, we certainly get quite a sense in the course of the action that finding oneself in the new world involves getting eaten alive by the old one. The narrative of this film would seem to be primarily a kooky rendition “Death of a Salesman”—Gao’s first gig onscreen involving a pop-up gambling den for which he unloads the working capital from a bag labelled “Kook.” But the foreground incident is more a toss away travesty (a left-hand jag) than a substantive range of intention. What puts “everyday reality” firmly into the category of freak show are sporadic avenues of modern motion whereby Gao and his utterly self-blinded family ties confirm, for nanoseconds anyway, that there is more to life than rural modesty would have you believe.
A close look at the first moments of the film brings us to an outlook from which to maintain Hou’s positioning within the strenuous and subtle obsessions of Melville and Mann. Not that far removed from the opening scene of Mann’s Thief and its vehicle (a black sedan) underway in darkness and shrouded in a ringing, rasping soundscape, we start with dead silence as the credits arrive in the form of ancient Chinese lettering fastening to a black background, and only after a little while do we gradually discern the click-clack of a train and the a corresponding bouncy American pop baseline becoming part of an aural alloy wherein funky uprising becomes Buddhist funeral chant. Only after that bemusing dynamic makes its pitch does the screen reveal a darkened railroad coach (its few tiny and perfunctory emergency lights along the ceiling) and three blurred figures that pop out at us when the source of the vague trouble—a tunnel—is cleared. This light pattern is repeated a few times, as if to include those lives in such variable power levels. Gao is eventually seen as preoccupied with gaining a clear signal from his cell phone and Flatty and Pretzel pass the time playing with the toddler of some other passenger and enacting a Punch and Judy scenario (he sitting on her lap and she pushing him away with much agitation). The dampening of the initial sonic energy is routed in turn, for a moment, by a scene touched off by Gao’s yelling into his device, “I’m on a train!” We immediately cut to the exterior of the train as a smoothly flowing stream of energy upon glowing tracks and in a surround of golden-tinged foliage on verdant hills in a sunset. First of all this rally occurs in silence; then an electro beat fills the air. The kinetic pulse moves in the direction of the camera position showing many pristine ribbons of tracks. Then there is but one track plying a grotty locale and the traditional chants resume. The chant becomes frenzied; the locale becomes clean and lush; the still-glowing hills reappear; and then the title comes up, in a spring-green color. One final gift comes our way. We see a swatch of the exterior of a moving train touched by bright sunlight in such a way that sky and coach become the same electrodynamic sphere. From there we have Gao on the platform being lightly badgered by a local associate. “You didn’t drive? When did you become so romantic?” Our protagonist also gives us a bit of spinelessness—“Flatty wanted to ride the train…” Then he immediately reveals an imperative to stand up for his choice, such as it is—“Give it a try…” He goes on to call out to a contact who appears from an upper window at that destination where a little casino is in the works, “Did you get the men?”[the idea of men here being far from straightforward]. The reply and its atmospherics round out our primer on going to the top. “Everything’s cool.” The perspective of Gao’s looking upwards creates cinematic overexposure, a strikingly sensuous rendition of “everything cool,” everything in pronounced unification.
The casino is a grating and absurd train wreck of discord. A group of tea aficionados needles Flatty for his preferring beer and one of them insults him repeatedly about the shape of his head. “He doesn’t like being called Flat Head…”/ “But that’s what he looks like…” Flatty lurches from his chair and punches his tormentor. Much confusion ensues. Gao, who had, with the game of chance in full swing (sleek plastic counters on the table), gotten sidetracked about a stray dog running around, puts out the brawl. On to morning where the three outsiders have breakfast with a family member living in the town where the game took place who, on the phone and then with cronies, can only talk about a family (his, and theirs) wracked with inheritance strife. They drift in and out of the kitchen as if they were immune to such cloying, boring matters. “He does nothing but play the lottery. So he’s bugging your mom. He’s mad!” Flatty squats in traditional style while eating his breakfast. A pan from his vantage point overlooking the tracks reveals two elderly ladies clambering awkwardly into a coach. That route’s magic still obtains for the right viewer; and this disconcerting end of the episode registers as a sharp rebuke to those would-be entrepreneurial magicians, mercilessly exposed as no more to the point than the stray dog. Flatty—flat indeed, despite all the snap in the air—frets to Pretzel not to include fat meat in his breakfast; Gao is largely speechless as another venture proves to be all fat and no meat.
Our protagonist had complained, in calling ahead to one of the locals assisting the gambling score that turned out to be a shutout, “Reception ain’t good!” At the heart of this ambitious film which many find to be, if not completely aimless, trivial, is a challenge of reception as crucial as it is universally ignored. The poignant disconnections, famously found in the films of Ozu and famously recognized in many of Hou’s early works, have, with Goodbye South, Goodbye, flooded over to the disposition of hitherto sensitive aficionados—now become crude and militant know-nothings. As we proceed with the ominous cadence of quick gulps of the new and slow gluttony of the old, we should observe that the repeated pattern of missing the train while catching the travesty is a necessary immersion in true cinematic excitement.
Flatty’s peasant squat while gobbling his breakfast (prepared by his little lady, whom he addresses with a saying he must have heard from his grandma—“…a bowl of rice to know you better…”) is promptly followed by a Taipei night club with a Western art deco mural and a chanteuse in a blonde wig singing (badly), “Shanghai at Night.” “You are a city with no lights… glorious lights… clamoring cars… Music numbs the heart… Who knows her heart is tart… Night life is lived for living… Wine is drunk for forgetting… Live for today and youth is wasted…Fuzzy dawn, quick awakening…” When you think of the hapless femme fatale in a blonde wig in Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994), you have to conclude that such a blast of fading cool here comes to us as an indication that that previous authentic Express service would not be coming around very often. The performance segues to a clock face which gradually reveals a tattoo so overrun with incident as to be almost a sheer black stain, Gao’s tattoo opening out to specifically him smoking dope, playing with a device that traces progress in the game by way of a light piano sonata, and conversing on their bed with his attractive girlfriend, Ying (Gao himself being movie-star impressive). He enthuses to her—good bye magic temporality, electrodynamics—“My investment in Shenyang is taking shape…”
Ying’s response to this business introduces an important specificity about Gao’s being, in the last analysis, missing in action. Her distinctly more poised presence than anyone else around functions as a thematic upping of the ante upon a herd of reflexive creatures doing their thing. She pushes him beyond the video arcade dominating his mind that day to his wider outlook, assuming there is such a thing, in the form of shifting his operations to the Shanghai being bemusingly broached by the song at the outset of this second trial. The video parlor is seen by him, rather preciously, self-dramaticizingly, as his “swansong,” because “It’s too late” [to strike it rich in Taiwan], it now being necessary for those who [presume to] think big to go to Mainland China. “Thinking about Shanghai… Open a restaurant…Entertainment. Everything is good there…” Ying, seeing right through him, quietly observes, “What you hear is always good. But they won’t talk when they’ve failed.” Gao counters with, “If you have relationships, everything will be cool.” Then their dreamy ensemble drift (nestled nude on her bed in the dark) comes to a pot hole which seriously precludes the notion that everything will be cool. Ying (knowing full well as we’ll soon see) asks, “Who are you bringing?” On his confirming the who to be Flatty and Pretzel, she asks, with a world of appallment already under her belt, “What for?” Gao, sounding more like a Boy Scout leader than an entrepreneur as to massive risks, blurts out—with, it would seem, fortification more by hugely revered Confucian precepts than by any rigorous discernment—“To see what they can do. Disco. Restaurant.” Ying, becoming by the moment more clearly a far more serious modern figure than Gao, lets the wheeler dealer taste some of the edge entailed in the here and now. “What can they do?” He goes into a priggish mode in replying, “Don’t look down on the family [The translation uses “combination” to close the phrase, as if those links could never be an absolute let-down]. Perhaps we can shake up the City,” he fantasizes. And, seeing how unimpressed she is for this tolerance for young brother and his girlfriend, he reaches down for a cliché of boosterism, “You don’t think so? But if you don’t rub things hard sparks won’t fly.” (This pin-ball machine inferring sounds a lot like that of the girl in the blonde wig.) Ying favors planning everything ahead in a competitive economy. And he sneers at that lack of holy serendipity—“Right. You’re good at that… I’m not like that. I like it unpredictable” [the sense of “romantic” putting in an appearance; but rootless cliché being far more heavily favored]. Then he strings her the limp line, “Give me a little time. We’ll have everything.”
This clash of world views has set up a dramatic follow-through whereby the highly touted “relationship” declares being taken for a ride by those Shanghai smoothies Gao looks to dazzle with those sputtering sparks. The supposed lamplighter blubbers, “On the Mainland they play a different tune every day.” And, even more to the point of Gao’s naiveté, during that upsurge of bad investment there is Pretzel’s suicide attempt at the “gigolo joint” where she had racked up more than a million in debts for the sake of various indulgences, been asked to settle up, tried to “give them the shaft” and made a huge scene in accordance with imbalance in the same league as Flatty’s. Ying breaks this news to Gao, Flatty being unable to do more than repeatedly toss a small child’s basketball into a little hoop affixed to his big bro’s living room wall. “Some kind of screw-up again?” the Confucian moots. “You can see it,” she says. What we can especially see is furnished by Gao’s racing home to deal with his disappointing coterie. It’s a particularly dark and rainy night, especially during the first moments in a tunnel, and we see the jet black car from just beyond the front bumper as it races in such a way as to repel the water like a power boat cutting into the explosiveness of the elements. The headlights flare forward like ghostly eyes and in this protracted context of riding a force of nature the man pointedly losing it (now barely comprehensible as a discrete figure) enjoys a reprieve. The electro-beat, from that moment when the credits ran, returns, along with the punk/Buddhist chant. We don’t know it at the time, but this is his final fine experience as a modernist devote.
The cut, from this moment so close to the optics of Michael Mann (Goodbye South, Goodbye follows by one year Mann’s Heat), dishes out the now furiously aggravating (to some audience members, anyway) childishness of Flatty and his damn rubber ball and Pretzel and her damn padded cell appetites. Gao’s dragging out of him the fact of his knowing that his girl was on another monstrous binge involves so much to the point of the belief in ultimate male responsibility. There is Gao’s making a lot of angry noise; but nothing more (Ying reminding him, “Yelling won’t get you shit!”). Then the protagonist is pestered on the phone by more hysterical relatives to help them find a new place. “Tell your mother that moving is not war” [In fact this saga is there to tell us just how much war is entailed in the groundwork of motion]. He reproves Pretzel (who had worked herself into a tearful frenzy pounding on the pad of a video game [while Flatty imagined being in the NBA]) for not closing the bathroom door while she was on the toilet. “This is manners. The whole world knows it…” Dropping that subject, he adds, “You guys got food all over! Help your big brother maintain the environment…” We are in the hands of a master of dramatic tonality, and thereby the copious episodes to follow that butchery of pristine composure trace a subtle and absorbing coarsening of Gao’s sensibility. Now that we’ve veered somewhat into the harsh headlights of Mann’s work (unlike that of Hou, sporting no cinematic wardrobe inspired by Ozu to spark expectations of blue chip manners), we also stand more intensely exposed to the questions Hou’s option elicits. One of Gao’s expressions of disgust directed at Flatty on that day of disappointment was, “Shit, always giving me situations!” Situations are to the fore; situations involving fatal flaws and feeble choices, the very same war, based in “moving,” which Mann, far from ever being mistaken for Ozu, has enlisted in and steadily pursued.
Going over to the new home he’s financed, the protagonist has Flatty and Pretzel along with him, breezing only on motorcycles. This kind of dynamic has done magic for him before, however short-lived. Now it’s on the starkly bilious side, the whole trip along underpasses and brightened roadways of Taipei bathed in tepid green filtering, not without some muted frisson but disappointing in the last analysis. That forms a prelude to a restaurant flop (the usual suspects being a nuisance); but at the same time there is Gao’s making a wok spit fire, a bit of physical action he finds to be a relief if nothing else. (The fiery flares of Mann’s Thief create their own quiet havoc here.) On, then, to a moment of truth at last about how decrepit his gestures of newness and cool have always been. Some compatriots from Gao’s South Taiwan homeland drop by the barely credible “restaurant” (lacking Coca-Cola, Pretzel brings another drink and insists the customers settle for that) and they run by him a scheme to exploit condemned farmland to the tune of selling the pigs thereon to a government willing to compensate the bewildered and desperate land owners. (The insistence upon presenting the livestock as “stud hogs” speaks to the potency crisis poisoning everything in sight.) “We’ll stock up on [more] pigs” [than were in fact inherent to the property] at a huge margin. Down South (the trip there showing Flatty driving and Gao snoozing in the death seat, mouth open to recall the grandfather who passed out at the failing food business), after running the score past a local government official who would have to be paid off and who insists, “Elder must feel right about it…” the deal goes through, and there’s a party in a large rural restaurant/hotel to mark all that prowess. (In concluding that snore of a drive [with tacky folk music on the car radio] they come to the high wall of a pig barn in corrugated steel. This stands in marked contrast to the shimmering train coach exterior melding with hazy skies at the end of that first [“romantic”] ride to the pop-up casino. Further to this ominous power outage, during the pig exchange, Pretzel and Flatty simulate a dog fight—not exactly a war—with shadow puppets on the mud, produced with their hands, she adding a soundtrack with that talent of hers to sound like an infant. The formal optics are actually quite strikingly beautiful; but the full specificity is rather vomitous.) After a night of “celebration” in a party room bereft of visual excitement and glutted with painfully strained cool and revelry, there is a cut to Gao vomiting in his hotel room toilet and bemoaning the hardness of his life. (Pretzel rubs his back abstractedly and says, “Filthy.” Flatty maintains, “It’s better if he barfs up.” What he barfs up is arguably not for the better.) “I failed my father… Ying wanted me to open a restaurant… ‘Fuck,’ the fortune teller said… I have some tough fights ahead of me… I’m only running a restaurant. I’m so fucking tired! And I still have a big fucking battle to fight! [Bemoaning such strife has been quietly served up to us as not having the right stuff.] Running a restaurant and still have to fight? Motherfucking shit! How can I propose to Ying? Been doing this for 10 years… nothing to show for… How can I talk about the future?”
Ying phones next morning, he asks her to come down South; and in the interim the three blind mice board a couple of motorcycles to pay a visit to family members in the vicinity. The ride, through lush tropical forest—Flatty chewing on gum to such an extent as to recall the pigs as being more cool—entails the schemers moving toward us headlong, weaving through muddy light in such a way as to conjure up Elvis in his pudgy period getting caught up in a very low budget pack of fun. The Enfants Terribles are out front, Gao trailing (and that is his position now, right to his low budget end). Pretzel yells out,, “Big Brother’s bike sounds like scrap metal!” Flatty increases the wit with, “Big Bro, your bike is going to blow up!” [an appropriately ominous, in fact, look into the near future]. A rather gypsy-sounding musical motif comes up, only to an effect of tarnishing the dash of those earlier moments of kinetic integrity. The permanent children exclaim, “So far away! Almost there!” And we thank our lucky stars for Hou’s being a stud in turning the knife in that way. The scene ends with a train in the distance threading through the jungle. Gao’s almost there now being so far away.
At the relative’s house the large pig draws a bead on a new level of pigging out (on that inheritance which the two migrant Bros, in days past when the world was their oyster, felt themselves too sharp to mess with). This moment of a third brother passing the buck in face of the violence the estate has engendered is also an occasion to digest the antiquated preoccupations which Gao has failed to draw a bead on. The deceased cash cows, a patriarch and his wife, are described by the Southern host as having “achieved nirvana… Mom and Dad became gods…” Crashing into this ethereal consideration is baby Flatty’s howl, “I want my share!” Leaving that incendiary stalemate, Gao has his last close encounter with Ying (Yin to his Yang?) She has a critically ill sister in the States (HIV, more lethal interaction), she’s been asked to take over the real estate business of whom and she declares, “I’m dying to have a change of scene.” She watches him closely as he tries to finesse the fiasco about the restaurant in Shanghai—his nirvana, his gods. Back on the farm the less than loving relatives call Flatty a punk and beat him up. Gao goes along with the lightweight’s objectives, still sounding as if he were a competent manager and all the while rounding up guns like a cretin. “I got a situation here” [that word again], he remarks to a contact in the region, the situation of course far surpassing punk gestures. (The pig thieves had told him, “Bring your boys. Our guys in the South will back you up. Pack heat [this is 1996], you need to scare them.”) At this point the black car is tinged with blood-red light. As the captives are driven along a lost highway, the atmospherics do little more than sketch out a children’s ride through a carnival fun house. Closely linked to that dead end, there is a coda (actually preceding the fatal accident which functions as a bit of a throwback to scuttlebutt about a business in Shanghai being an “accidental success,” right up the alley of an avatar of “unpredictable”) wherein another lounge singer (actually a local politician who is far more adept at reading the hoi polloi and their two-bit crush on celebrity than producing music to our ears) holds forth, like the instant blonde, with ditsy sentiment carrying a trace of validity. “I’ll sing a song from before you were born. A world of desire. Lots of love. Male revenge. The shame I found when she left me. I wanted to end the pain of lost love. The most important thing for a man is to have guts. Nothing but love and hate. The lowly ones, they kill themselves. They hurt others. You can see it in the paper every day. Nothing but love and hate, kill and hurt. These are really foolish people. Oh, I’m here to drink…But now I’m talking such talk… But you should not say such things… I really listen with interest… Looks like you’re a manly dude. You would be abandoned by women, too. For I was abandoned by a woman 3 years ago. The blow to my spirit pushed me toward suicide. But I changed my outlook. Look at love as an experience…” The camera pulls back to reveal negotiations about sparing our modernists. The singing “Senator” diverts his impetuous family from becoming a political liability; the kidnappers release the urban punks, but not before throwing the keys of that once-proud vehicle into a pitch-dark field, in lieu of “kill and hurt.”
Ying’s account of being ready for momentous change elicits from Gao the same kind of gutless whining he indulged in the night before. “How can I go to America? I don’t know English! How can I live? Ying calmly reports, “When my sister went she didn’t know a word. You can learn there. Learn in that environment. Will you consider it?” A phone call from Flatty about scoring the environment not allowing serious learning ends their life together. Such interactive intensities in this context can lead us astray—into the realm of personal failure and success—unless we hearken to those moments of cinematic potency which situate (“I got a situation here”) the players as stemming from a torrent of motion whereby they become part of “a change of scene” which takes precedence over business as usual. That situation is remarkably close to the matters of importance to Melville and Mann.
But whereas in the works of the latter two film renegades we have protagonists having crossed that line within which a world history maintains a ready invitation, in Goodbye South, Goodbye, the protagonist, for all his touching upon the decline of a normality, a normality which affords creative heft in myriad correspondence, remains a loyalist to such rot-gut invitations. (An ongoing image has the trio eating from rice bowls and steadily discarding indigestible elements.) Gao could be called an avatar of Yang, the principle of optimistic sunniness, Yang in the form of being invaded by cloudiness, Yin. Ying (Yin?) absorbs and conveys to Gao that feeling lucky (bound for accidental success) and giving the benefit of the doubt to everyone misses the rich, dark depths of life. Her willingness to depart the realm of Confucian simplistic domesticity (compare this with Bob le Flambeur’s imaginative migration to America) and Yin/Yang weddedness to facile synthesis provides a tincture of serious traction within a saga of catastrophic drift.
On the other hand, Hou’s film excitingly attends to the odds in favor of immovably superficial motives certified by no longer cogent nods to motion sanctifying inertia. His rewarding construction of Gao’s brief ups and endless downs opens a rousing complement to the dark warfare of Melville and Mann—an initiative adumbrated in Melville’s Le Samourai with its Ying-like presence in the form of Antonioni’s protagonist in his Red Desert, namely, Giuliana. Gao’s steadfast persistence with conventional oblivion (from out of a flirtation with something very unconventional) has the makings of a “change of scene” occurring while staying at home. Conversely, the stunning failure of the quasi-humanist—a trajectory ushered forth by a keynote of being doggedly “unpredictable” and as such in thrall to peasant gambling addiction—points toward the likes of his girlfriend, far more adept than he in the ways of solitude the credibility of which is there to be seen in those upsurges of incalculable energy. It may come about that her hard-nose dismissal of hundreds of millions constitutes, paradoxically, a pathway to partnerships in the world at large.
Goodbye South, Goodbye is far from a simple entertainment. It is even far from an edifying instance of the art film industry. It has in fact nothing to do with psychology and sociology, let alone politics and ethics. It is, like the films of Melville and Mann, a filmic refinement of dynamic phenomena to serve vigorous lives.
Great essay. I’ve twitterpated the link.
Thanks very much, John.
Sounds like this is far more auspicious than other films by this director, which I think are more humanist. I’d definitely like to see it! Great review!
Thanks, Peter.
Hou Hsiao Hsien seems to be on a track akin to that of those Italian Neorealists who, all at once, reared up and put their money on metaphysics. I love how the migration to outer space does not abandon the rich reservoir of earthbound human display.
Italian neorealism is indeed to these eyes a vital proposition when evaluating this great director.
Yet another stupendous review here Jim! The thematic kinships to Kar Wai, Antonioni, Mann and Melville are intriguing posed towards some fascinating revelations. Yes this film is unique in the director’s canon, but in the very best sense. I am motivated by this acute and inspired piece to get back for an encore viewing. And I am happy to hear that yet another Hou Hsiao Hsien reviews of his most recent work in possible upcoming.
Thanks, Sam.
I really have no business talking about films I haven’t seen; but for the sake of, if nothing else, better exposing my methodology I must say that I do feel like flying out of the starting gate with a title like The Assassin, when the track is chock-a-block with serial killers. (Manhunter—coming after Collateral—being not simply about resentful delusions of grandeur but also General Sherman’s shock and awe through the South, culminating in Atlanta.) Similarly Mann’s Blackhat would seem to have something to do with the too-cool-for-school Le Samourai.
There are several other Hou Hsiao Hsien movies I’m eager to see. He is such an inventive and thought-provoking outrider for the doomed protagonists of Melville and Mann.