Quote:
A Complex Taiwan Tale Needs a Key
In a series of eloquent, dazzling and demanding films, the director Hou Hsiao-hsien has depicted the history of Taiwan through individuals with deeply moving life stories. The island itself — a Japanese colony before World War II, then controlled by the Nationalist Chinese with violent repression during the cold-war years — has come to seem his most treasured character. “City of Sadness,” shown at the New York Film festival in 1989, tells Taiwan’s story as a family saga. The poetic “Puppetmaster,” shown at the festival two years ago, layers Taiwan’s history with the biography of an aged puppet maker. Now, in “Good Men, Good Women,” Mr. Hou depicts Taiwan in an even more complex way, blending history with fiction, and juxtaposing the present with recent memories. He even includes a fact-based, black-and-white movie within this elegantly shot film. “Good Men, Good Women” will be shown as part of the New York Film Festival this afternoon at 2. It is one of the most richly imagined and also one of the most difficult films in the series.

The film is truly baffling unless you walk in knowing about the plot and characters and about the chronology that Mr. Hou shatters then asks his viewers to reconstruct. At the center is Liang Ching, a thoroughly contemporary actress who is receiving frightening faxes. Someone has stolen her diary, and when they fax copies of its pages back to her, they set off memories of her lover, Ah Wei, a shady character who was murdered several years before. The contemporary scenes and recent flashbacks are shot in bright, harsh colors that suggest the lurid unhappiness of Liang Ching’s life.

Liang Ching is also about to start filming a historical movie called “Good Men, Good Women.” As she prepares to play the heroine, Chiang Bi-yu, we see black-and-white episodes from the movie as she imagines it. In 1940, Chiang Bi-yu and her husband leave Taiwan for mainland China to fight the Japanese who are trying to take over the country. But they are almost executed as spies for the Japanese. After the war, back in Taiwan, they become political victims of the Nationalists.

Chiang Bi-yu’s story is told chronologically, with long sections scattered throughout the film. The product of Liang Ching’s imagination, this movie-in-a-movie is a stately, historical drama, the exact opposite of the sophisticated, fragmented story Mr. Hou is creating in the film’s larger view.

Using his typical style, Mr. Hou’s camera takes a serene, often distant position from all he observes, slowly allowing the pieces to fit together and the emotional resonance to make itself felt. The sad Liang Ching sees herself in the character she plays. In a flashback she remembers discussing a possible pregnancy and abortion with Ah Wei; in the black-and-white movie, Chiang Bi-yu has a son and gives him up so she can go on fighting the Japanese. By the end, Liang Ching’s apparently tenuous connection to Chiang Bi-yu evokes a stunning emotional response. “Good Men, Good Women” is not obscure for its own sake; it is a rigorous work of art whose mysteries are worth unraveling. GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien; written (in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, Cantonese and Fujian, with English subtitles) by Chu Tien-wen, based on an original play by Chiang Bi-yu and Lan Bo-chow; director of photography, Chen Hwai-en; edited by Liao Ching-song; music by Mr. Chen and Chiang Hsiao-wen; produced by Katsuhiro Mizuno, Shozo Ichiyama, King Jieh-wen and Ben Hsieh. At Alice Tully Hall today at 2 P.M. as part of the 33d New York Film Festival. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Annie Shizuka Inoh (Liang Ching/ Chiang Bi-yu), Lim Giong (Chung Hao-tung) and Jack Kao (Ah Wei)
Caryn James, NY Times, October 7, 1995

Good.Men.Good.Women.1995.DVDRip.x264-SMz.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 48mn
Size: 	1.59 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	684x460 ~> 817x460
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	1 850 Kbps
BPP: 	0.245
Audio
#1:  	Chinese AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/2CA575CDFD0BB7E/Good.Men.Good.Women.1995.DVDRip.x264-SMz.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Min Nan
Subtitles:English, Japanese, Chinese

The post Hsiao-hsien Hou – Hao nan hao nu AKA Good Men, Good Women (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Nick Schager – Lessons of Darkness wrote:
As the new millennium dawns, Vicky (Qi Shu) balances separate love affairs with abusive, drug-smoking Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan) and paternal petty gangster Jack (Jack Kao) in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s exquisite Millennium Mambo. Narrated (in hindsight) by Vicky from the year 2011, the film’s splintered, flashback-heavy narrative nominally concerns Vicky’s tumultuous two romances, though the storyline is – even more than usual for Hou – largely inconsequential. Supposedly part of a trilogy about Taiwanese youth culture, Millennium Mambo is similar to Hou’s superior Goodbye South, Goodbye in that both chart small-timers’ aimless search for money, love, or, at least, some fleeting feeling of genuine human connection. As is his custom, Hou frames his bored, detached protagonist (who, in a telling early scene, lies motionless as Hao-Hao sexually ravages her body) in doorways and hallways, thus visualizing Vicky’s inability (or unwillingness) to abandon her vacant, static existence for something more fulfilling. Nonetheless, Vicky’s narration alludes to her eventual evolution, as does the ravishing opening sequence (seemingly set in 2011) in which she prances down a deserted walkway and – one can sense – away from the tedium and madness of her former life. Despite its techno-enhanced rhythm and stunning cinematography by In the Mood for Love’s Mark Lee Ping-bin – who uses bold, primary colors to create a pulsating vision of Taiwan nightlife – there’s a noticeable redundancy about Hou’s latest. But as proven by moments like Vicky leaving a temporary face-print in the snow – one of the film’s many stirring visions of the transitory nature of life – even a minor Hou effort is brimming with poignant artistry.

Cian si man po aka Millennium Mambo - Hsiao-Hsien Hou (2001).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 45 min
Size: 	3.79 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 501 kb/s
BPP: 	0.331
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s (Fixed audio from DVD TF1)

https://nitro.download/view/E756ABB37BAAA5A/Cian_si_man_po_aka_Millennium_Mambo_-_Hsiao-Hsien_Hou_(2001).mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English, French, Swedish

The post Hsiao-Hsien Hou – Qian xi man bo aka Millennium Mambo (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
The eldest daughter of a broken and troubled family works to keep the family together and look after her younger siblings, who are slipping into a life of crime.

Review:
At first sight, you wouldn’t clock this as a film from the director of A Summer at Grandpa’s and The Time to Live and the Time to Die. But despite the shift from his usual rural settings to the extremely mean streets of present-day Taipei, this is another of Hou’s haunting accounts of the joys and terrors of adolescence. The central character is a young woman struggling to keep her father and elder brother (cop and thief respectively) from each other’s throats, while nursing a distant crush on one of her brother’s friends, a too-pretty gigolo who gets into trouble when he starts dating a gangster’s moll. The tangled relationships resolve themselves into a mesh of disappointments and frustrations, but despite the downbeat mood there are charming eruptions of humour, and the sheer eloquence of Hou’s mellow visual style makes the film a lot more life-enhancing than most.

Boiled down to its essence, Daughter of the Nile is the poignant story of unrequited love set amidst a world of young people, some of whom are petty gangsters, much like the group in Martin Scorsese’s visceral Mean Streets (1973). Lin Hsiao-yang (Taiwanese pop star Lin Yang) is, as the movie begins, a sensitive 19-year-old student working part time in a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Taipei and pining for petty thug Ah-sang (Fan Yang), the best friend of her older brother Lin Hsaio-fang (Jack Kao), who is also involved in shady dealings. Daughter of the Nile (a reference to an ancient Egyptian-themed manga she is fond of reading) tells her story, which she narrates after the fact of the life-altering events in the movie – the film itself often seems like a dream-like fable of a time long ago – while offering a panoramic, subtly scathing portrait of a culture that has abandoned tradition and has lost the ability to make the human connections many of us take for granted. (The late Taiwanese director Edward Yang, who was a friend of Hou’s, approached his characters in a completely different way in his masterful, joyous Taipei-set Yi Yi (2000). In Yi Yi, they try to connect between themselves and often succeed, but Yang’s colourful, appealing Taipei is not the indifferent, even cold and forbidding city that Hou casts it as in his earlier film, beautifully shot by Chen Huai-en.).

http://nitroflare.com/view/1EB66941DABEB1C/Hsiao-hsien_Hou_-_%281987%29_Daughter_of_the_Nile.mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English

The post Hsiao-Hsien Hou – Ni luo he nu er AKA Daughter of the Nile (1987) first appeared on Cinema of the World.