Goodbye South, Goodbye

viewed January 14, 2000 at the Asian Art Museum

For more information about this film, click here.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien foregoes his usual fixation with Taiwan's past to deal squarely with its present.  Kao, the protagonist of Goodbye South, Goodbye, is so caught up in looking forward to the future that he can hardly remember what he was looking forward to a month ago.  With the hot-tempered Flatty (Taiwanese rock star Lim Giong) and Flatty's airheaded girlfriend (Annie Shizuka Inoh, the lead of Good Men, Good Women) in tow, Kao drifts through the suburbs of Taiwan from one misadventure to another.  There isn't much of a narrative in the traditional three-act sense; instead we get to follow the trio's constant involvement with the present, wallowing through the squalor of entanglement followed by foiled scheme followed by kidnapping. 

Quite characteristic of Hou, the film doesn't rush through its episodes, but lets the viewer take in each scene for all of its worth; each setting is a gem of composition, often making great use of foreground and background (I am thinking of a scene where a businessman is abused in a private room while through a doorway we see thugs playing pool).  The various clothes and bottles strewn about a hotel room, or the smoky lighting of liquor glasses on a table, offers immense knowledge and feeling of these seedy settings. 

While the camera lingers on these items of a fleeting existence, the characters busy themselves with dreams and schemes of making money, only to be distracted by the victims of prior schemes catching up with them.  They have no sense of history, and so they will always be its victims.  When Flatty is in need of money, he remembers a recently deceased uncle and goes home to claim his share of the inheritance.  Unfortunately, he had neglected to send his claim a long time ago when the uncle had actually died.  His return home only alarms the authorities (one of whom is his cousin) and he is taken down by the police while his girlfriend flails her purse in anger.

Even the responsible Kao, who repeatedly manages to keep Flatty from getting himself killed, has a loose grasp with his past.  He is always looking towards a big score that will set him for life, whether it be in Taipei, Hong Kong, or even northern China.  Meanwhile he squanders his time working for a ganglord on a local scheme to resell pigs to the local agricultural commission (this inspires a hilarious long shot of pigs being unloaded from several trucks that is surprisingly beautiful).  His lack of memory is exemplified in another hilarous bit where he feeds a dog with his chopsticks.  Someone warns him that he can get rabies from sharing chopsticks with the dog, so he uses the short end of the chopsticks to feed himself.  However, he then uses the short end to feed the dog!  His constant attachment to the present is what he lives for -- and it screws him over again and again, but his resourcefulness always manages to pull him through.  The most revealing scene occurs after he's had a hell of a dinner whooping it up with this cronies in swine larceny: after booting his guts into a toilet, he crawls to bed and wails about all of his past failures.  Apparently he hasn't forgotten the past, but has chosen to avoid it as much as possible.  Unfortunately, the past has a nasty way of keeping up.

This painful scene of drunken regret is juxtaposed some time later by one of complete abandon, that crystallizes the kind of joy that these people are capable of finding.  The trio takes a ride to Flatty's hometown by motorbike up a winding hillside road, and with only the engines in the soundtrack we see them from the front in one long continuous take as they rev their way uphill with expressions of pure glee.  It is so clear that they have forgotten themselves in their movement.  Interestingly, Hou shoots them only from the front, we never see what they are moving towards until it has already passed them.  Again, while they are busy rushing towards their immediate future, our sight is fixed on other things: them, with their expressions of anticipation, as well as what they have left behind.  

This trio -- a responsible but short-sighted protagonist, his reckless but inseparable friend, and the girl in tow -- is reminiscent of the trio in Mean Streets.  Both films also share similar climaxes, the would-be heroes finding themselves hopelessly stuck, and on the brink of realizing it -- if they only wanted to make that revelation.  And yet they can't take themselves out of the vicious circle that is their social surroundings, because they've become too familiar with it to leave.  For Kao, what is outside -- temporally as well as physically -- is even scarier that the shit he already has to deal with. 

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