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A Director’s Choices in Two “Good” Movies (Part 2)
Continued from last week’s post on Hsiao-hsien Hou:
The question of intent comes up a lot when I watch a film. Whether we finish the movie or walk out, whether we hit the pause button or fast forward, whether we watch the entire thing in one sitting or not — a movie (and by this I mean a feature film, not a short) demands more of our attention than any other art form. Your average film takes about 2 hours to watch. If the job of an artist is to captivate us during the time they take, for a moviemaker that’s a tall order.
Good Men, Good Women is a movie that stares this challenge in the face, and compounds it. A woman’s diary is stolen by a stranger who mysteriously and randomly faxes pages of it back to her. An actress goes through a journey of self-discovery as she strives to play a real-life person. Each of these premises sound like the beginning of a solid film on their own. In Good Men, Good Women they are combined into one narrative. But Hsiao-hsien Hou isn’t done yet. He adds flashbacks. He varies shooting formats. And then, he presents it all in the slow, methodical pace that is his personal style.
The biggest choices HHH makes in Good Men, Good Women are about the main character and how to present her. Liang, an actress, has taken on the role of Chiang Bi-Yu, a real-life Taiwanese activist during the 1940′s. Good Men, Good Women opens with a clip from that film. Cut to a scene from Liang’s personal life. Liang is sleeping when her fax machine/phone rings. Pages come through. Liang gets up and reads them. Immediately she realizes: her diary has been stolen. Which would be bad enough — except that the diary entries are about Liang’s previous love, a gangster who was killed in a shooting.
This is Liang’s film — there’s no doubt about that — but throughout Good Men, Good Women she’s portrayed as someone constantly (and sometimes literally) in the grasp of external forces: the role she’s playing, people from her daily life, people from her memories, and a stranger faxing her letters from her past. Liang’s way of dealing with these problems, when she’s not acting, is by sleeping them off. Here she is taking a quick nap on set.
Liang’s flashbacks of her past and clips of her film are the foundation of the story. HHH shoots the flashbacks with a voyeuristic eye. Shots are framed from a distance, and often through windows, mirrors and reflections.
You may have noticed in the above shots that Liang is not always the primary subject in the frame. In her flashbacks, entire scenes pass where her back is to the camera, or other people talk and act while she listens and watches. This is intentional. Watching the film is akin to watching a slasher film: you want the victims to escape. When they don’t, and choose instead to stay, you are puzzled, frustrated, maybe even maddened. But there is no chasing killer in Good Men, Good Women — just a victim. Eventually, you wonder if there will be a payoff — if there is a point to watching. And that’s where HHH wants you to be.
One of the last shots of the film illustrates the point beautifully. What starts out as a wide shot in black-and-white of a funeral scene from Liang’s movie slowly changes to color as the camera moves in closer. Finally, Liang is in the foreground. Finally, she is letting go of her loved one’s death.
Art not only imitates life — they’ve met and joined for a kiss.
HHH’s choices might seem obvious and even manipulative, but they are bold ones to make. It’s one thing to portray the experience of a character; it is another to put the audience in the character’s shoes, to make them experience the same feelings a character has.
Comments
This film looks BOOOoooriinnng!!
JK!
I really like your exposition here. I kind of want to see this film now. Especially that she sleeps off her problems. It looks incredibly depressing. On a scaled of 1-10; 1 being the least depressing and 10 being suicidal, where does this film fall?
“Whether we finish the movie or walk out” I hate walking out. I think I did it once for Mr. Bean, but ended up going back just to finish it.
I can’t remember if I’ve actually walked out of a movie. The last REALLY bad movie I saw was Max Payne, and I still found reasons to finish it.
I’d answer your question with a 6. GMGW isn’t a depressing film like say, Leaving Las Vegas or Dancer in the Dark. But it is a sad film. The viewing experience is unique because you’re watching a character crumple herself down with grief, but the distance you’re forced to watch her from sort of dilutes your emotional involvement. IMO, this feeling of void works because it goes along with the film’s theme.
There’s a pulse of narrative in the film to push you along. But at one stretch in the middle, I actually fell asleep! The scene I was watching had no real connection to anything — it was a group of people talking idly and at length about a magazine they wanted to start.