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On Good Men, Good Women

Part of the fun of Good Men, Good Women is piecing together the narrative as it unfolds.  Hou Hsiao-hsien doesn’t exactly withhold information, but rather, like in his previous film The Puppetmaster, he tends to explain events only after they’ve gone on long enough that, if you’ve made the effort, you’ve probably figured out what’s happening anyway.  So, be warned that there will be spoilers here as I’m going to try to sketch out the different layers of a narrative that folds the past and present in on themselves and reflects them back out again like a disco ball.
The several layers of Good Men, Good Women:
1. An actress (Liang Ching, played by Annie Shizuka Inoh) gets anonymous faxes of her stolen diary entries and phone calls with no one on the other line.  She sleeps a lot and drinks too much and hangs out with unsavory gangster and government types.  She also falls asleep watching Ozu’s Late Spring on the television.
2. She recalls her relationship with her now-dead gangster boyfriend Ah Wei (Hou regular Jack Kao).  They were in love, she was a bar hostess, he helped her kick a drug addiction, he was murdered, she accepted a payoff from his killers for which she now feels a bit guilty.  She often thought/thinks about having a child with him but as far as we know has never been pregnant.
3. Liang gets a job playing the lead role in a movie based on the (apparently) real life of Chiang Bi-yu, who went to China with her husband during World War II to fight the Japanese with Mao’s resistance, was initially suspected of being a Japanese spy (because they were from Taiwan and didn’t speak the local Cantonese dialect), eventually was allowed to join the struggle and was then forced by circumstance to put her first child up for adoption, returned to Taiwan after the war to settle down with her family, and was imprisoned (and her husband killed) when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party (the Koumintang) took over and started rooting out Communists (much of this crackdown (the “February 28th Incident”) is dramatized in Hou’s A City of Sadness, which I’ve still, sadly, not seen).  Throughout the film we see scenes from this (now finished) movie, indicated by washed-out color, a blueish black and white.
4. There are also apparently “real” depictions of Chiang’s life, shown in full color and played slightly differently than the “film” versions.  This kind of thing Hou also did in The Puppetmaster, where an event unfolding on screen would be followed by the subject of that event telling us a slightly different version of it in a documentary-style interview.*(See Below)
5. Finally, we learn the film about Chiang is called Good Men, Good Women, which is also the name of the film we’ve been watching, making it both essentially a “documentary of its own making” and raising the question of whether the film within the film also contains present-day sequences: how much is “fictional” fictional and how much is “real” fictional?
If the film within the film is also the film itself, then Good Men, Good Women is both within and without, just as Chiang’s past is both real and depicted, as Liang is both Liang and Chiang (through the act of acting a role) and as Liang’s story with Ah Wei is both past and dominating her present (especially as we come to believe that her mysterious phone calls and faxes are being sent by Ah Wei’s ghost, literalizing the stranglehold her past has on her present).  It’d be silly to reduce this to some kind of metaphor like “time is a river” or pithy articulation like “the past isn’t dead — it isn’t even past” or something like that, and Hou doesn’t bother to do so in any kind of Malickian voiceover.  Instead, he just gives us the flow, with all the currents and eddies, branches and backwaters that go along with it.
This is one of the warmest Hou films I’ve seen, both in technique and in his attitude to the protagonist.  This is the first time I recall that I’ve seen Hou’s floating camera actually move into a frame.  Usually he’s content to let his long takes float around a single, middle-distance frame, which keeps us at a safe, theatrical distance from the action.  In Good Men, Good Women, however, he occasionally moves into the screen space, either to get a closer view (as in a shot that moves from a club’s dance floor to shoot through a window into a private room where some gangster business is being conducted) or simply to pivot and reframe a location from a different, closer angle (as in one of the first shots of the film, where the TV playing Late Spring is used as a pivot point to reframe Liang in her apartment as she goes through her morning (hungover afternoon?) routine.
What we take from the film is even more than is usual up to us as viewers.  Like Liang Chiang, we have to decide what role the cinematic experience of the past will have on our present lives.  In one reasonable interpretation of the film, it is through the process of re-enacting Chiang Bi-yu’s life that Liang gains the strength to confront her own past/ghost and thereby move on with her life.  Significantly, this breakthrough is a specifically cinematic/narrative one: by experiencing the narrative of another person’s life mediated by film (or filmmaking) she is able to contextualize/understand/deal with her own issues.  It’s by making a story out of history that we begin to understand our own lives.
(Contrast this with Michael Haneke’s approach to a similar dynamic in Cache, where a bourgeois man is confronted with anonymous messages reminding him of a crime from his own past that is heavy-handedly symbolic of Haneke’s belief that the French should suffer collective guilt over their ancestors’ colonization of Algeria.  Hou is sympathetic to his damaged, dissolute heroine and asserts cinema as a means to help her overcome her guilt and make her life a little happier; Haneke seeks to punish his hero and uses film as a means to assert our own complicity in his guilt and brutalize us, to “teach us a lesson”, in the process.)
Good Men, Good Women is very similar narratively and thematically to my personal favorite of Hou’s films, Millennium Mambo, whose heroine follows much the same progression as Liang: a bar hostess breaks up with a gangster boyfriend, has issues with drugs and apathy and eventually experiences a cinematic epiphany.  Like that film as well, the breakthrough, moving as it is, is also a potentially hollow one.  We’re not really sure when the filming of the film within Good Men, Good Women takes place.  It seems to run concurrent with the events in Liang’s home, where she is stalked by phone calls and faxes and which are apparently resolved with her confrontation of the “ghost”.  But that can’t be the case as the film shoot is on-location, and thus Liang would have to be away from her apartment.  The shooting of the film has to take place after Liang has confronted her past.  Conversely, the joy Shu Qi’s Vicky in Millennium Mambo experiences in the snow of the Hokkaido Film Festival is a memory, something that happened somewhere in the middle of her story between her petty gangster boyfriend and her older gangster protector (played by Jack Kao), all of which is seen through the lens of a much older Vicky thinking back on her youth in the film’s voiceover.  
It’s possible that the key scene in Good Men, Good Women is only alluded to in voiceover, when Liang tells us about meeting and interviewing Chiang Bi-yu shortly before her film shoot began.  It maybe that this interview, the inspiration from meeting the aged heroic woman, was the point Liang resolved to confront her past and that her phone call with the ghost took place after this interview but before filming began.  Hou then simply elided what should have been the dramatic high point of his story: the direct confrontation between past and present, when the old lady looks at the young woman and calmly demonstrates the moral authority gained by the difference between suffering for a cause and suffering from indolence.  That would have been the Oscar scene, but it would have grounded, concretized the movie.  It would have drawn sharp lines between past and present and it would have encouraged us to choose sides, to privilege one woman’s experience over the other’s, to separate and isolate and categorize.  What he’s given us instead is something much more elusive, more mysterious, more lifelike.  It floats.

Added August 27, 2012:  One of the many fun and frustrating things about Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films is that he never really makes it easy for you as a viewer to understand everything that’s unfolding as it happens.  Often, only once a film is completed will all its elements begin to make sense.  This effect is seen in miniature in a sequence from The Puppetmaster: after twenty minutes or so of scenes in which we witness a loving courtship between the protagonist Li Tienlu and a pretty young courtesan, including an elaborate ruse in which she tests his fidelity by tempting him with another woman and which he passes with flying colors, we get a scene of Li himself narrating the next chapter in their story.  At the very end of his interview, as an almost throwaway aside, he mentions that the while he was seeing this woman, he had a wife and children back home in another city.  Suddenly the romance is seen in a new light and the fidelity test becomes darkly ironic.  
This narrative strategy necessarily makes it difficult to catch anything like every nuance of a film on a single viewing, and sometimes even basic plot or style elements can get jumbled in a confusion of memory and speculation.  Hou’s films request and reward rewatches as much as any director I know.  Which is to say, I wrote this after having seen Good Men, Good Women only once, and watching it again, I realize I was very much mistaken about this point.
The film within the film of Good Men, Good Women is shown throughout in a blue-tinged monochrome.  What I initially thought were “actual” depictions of the historical events, though, I now am pretty sure are just “present day” footage of the rehearsals for the film Liang is undertaking.  I believe the film’s present is in the rehearsal period for the film, as Liang is studying her character, reflecting on her past life with Ah-Wei and receiving mysterious faxes of her old diary entries.  At one point, near the end of the film, as Liang’s character Chiang Bi-yu is mourning her executed husband in the film, the monochrome image bleeds into color.  The is the climax of the film: when the film within the film merges with present day reality.  Just as the film posits a fluidity in the relationship between past and present (and history and memory, as in most Hou films), this morphing creates a fluidity between cinema and reality, prefiguring some of the redemptive and transformative power cinema has in Hou’s later films like Millennium Mambo, Flight of the Red Balloon and Café Lumière.

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This Week in Rankings

Freaks – 14, 1932
The Mark of the Vampire – 19, 1935 
Northern Pursuit – 16, 1943
Jupiter’s Darling – 32, 1955
Throne of Blood – 2, 1957
The Sweet Smell of Success – 17, 1957
Wild Strawberries – 41, 1957
Paths of Glory – 44, 1957
The Enemy Below – 56, 1957
West Side Story – 11, 1961
Man’s Favorite Sport? – 13, 1964
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three – 5, 1974 
Moonrise Kingdom – 2012

On Man’s Favorite Sport?, Briefly

Late Howard Hawks reworking Bringing Up Baby with the relaxed, mellow episodic pace of Hatari!.  In other words, pretty much perfect.  Rock Hudson plays the Cary Grant part (Grant turned it down because he thought he was too old) and he’s much better than I expected.  It’s uncanny at time how much he looks like the 1930s Grant (with a little bit of Kyle Chandler mixed in) and shows a surprising flair for physical comedy, both in an amazing early sequence with a car half his size and later as he repeatedly pratfalls into a lake.  Paula Prentiss plays the screwball heroine, and she’s equal parts Mary Tyler Moore and Jane Fonda, very pretty and charming, if not quite as ideal the Hawks heroine as Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo.  This being late Hawks, it lacks the wild incandescent energy of Baby or His Girl Friday.  It’s a slow-motion screwball, not because Hawks can’t get it up to 99 MPH anymore, but because in old age he’s simply no longer in a hurry.

On Wild Strawberries

There’s a scene fairly early on in this movie that pretty much sums up the problem I have with it and Ingmar Bergman in general.  During the first of Victor Sjöström’s flashbacks, we see his “secret fiancee” get kissed by his good-for-nothing brother.  (We know the brother’s good-for-nothing because the dialogue helpfully tells us several times that he is, in fact, good-for-nothing.)  After the kiss, the girl, Sara, is anguished.  We know this because she cries “Ah!  I am anguished!” (or something like that, I don’t remember the dialogue exactly); because Bergman rushes in for a closer shot of her face, wearing an actorly expression of Anguish; because the kiss has spilled the Wild Strawberries she had been gathering to give her uncle, smearing her white dress–this is Symbolism (we know because Wild Strawberries is also the title of the film): her generous strawberry gift has been ruined by a selfish act, through this same act she has lost her innocence (despite the black and white, we can assume her white dress is now smeared red, please don’t make me explain what that is Symbolic of).  Basically, Bergman is never content to let things be subtle, he will let you know exactly what he means in every way he possibly can in every scene.  The film is utterly lifeless, over-determined and surprisingly sloppy.

Another example: we are told repeatedly that Sjöström’s is cold, a heartless old bastard, yet all we see is a slightly cantankerous, wistful old man who is nothing but nice to pretty blonde girls and anyone else he comes across.  So when, at the end, he’s learned to be nice and wistful, we haven’t learned anything.  We’ve gone on a journey through space and time but not character, as Sjöström’s flaws are only asserted in dialogue, never depicted.  The flashbacks do nothing to deepen his character, they show how he was betrayed by women, but not why (we are told his marriage is bad, but we don’t ever see any evidence of it, or ever he and his wife together).  This assertion as a substitute for dramatization applies to the character of Sjöström’s mother as well: we spend a long scene with her only to be told later that she’s “as cold as ice”.  But on the evidence of the scene we just watched, I thought she seemed remarkably pleasant for a 96 year old lady that no one ever visits.  This also applies to Gunnar Björnstrand as Sjöström’s son.  Ingrid Thulin tells us about his horrible crime: he is also a cold bastard, our evidence is that when she tells him she’s pregnant he gets mad and says it’s evil to bring a child into the world and he wishes he was dead.  This is clearly a man with serious psychological issues, or it would be if we actually took this nonsense seriously.  Fortunately, we must not, as the whole situation is resolved in Björnstrand’s only other scene, where he explains that he now will have the kid because he can’t live without Thulin.  Yippee!  Glad that’s resolved!

I did like the opening dream sequence, with its overt reference to The Phantom Carriage and a neat little visual trick where Sjöström is walking along a sidewalk, past a lamppost whose shadow apparently falls on the side of a building, but when Sjöström passes, he moves in front of the shadow instead of through it–the shadow is painted on the wall.  This opening sequence owes a huge debt to Cocteau and Buñuel, though it never reaches their height of surreality (Fellini does better in the opening dream of 8 1/2).  The rest of the film as well does follow a kind of dream logic, I kinda like that Sjöström’s flashbacks aren’t really flashbacks (because they’re of things he couldn’t have seen) but rather Scroogelike ghostly visitations, but even that logic gets screwed up in the second flashback: Sjöström and his examiner (“You’ve been accused of guilt.”  Blech) are watching Sjöström’s wife hook up with some dude in the woods in what first looks like rape but is apparently just infidelity.  Our POV is Sjöström’s, looking out in long shot at the couple far off in the distance.  But Bergman repeatedly violates that POV by cutting to close-ups of the couple as they struggle and then talk.  And it isn’t just that Sjöström has moved closer, because those close shots are intercut with reverse angles of Sjöström and the examiner in the same distant location, with repeated POV shots of them again looking at the couple far off in the distance.  You could probably get away with applying dream logic to that, except the examiner helpfully explains in dialogue that what we are seeing is a flashback, that Sjöström once stood in this same spot and saw and heard this exact scene.  So the long shot and dialogue is the flashback while the closeups are the dream?  I don’t buy it.  I think it’s just shoddy filmmaking.

Seventh Seal is soooo much better than this.

They Shot Pictures: Josef von Sternberg

I was honored to be invited to talk about Josef von Sternberg this week on the They Shot Pictures podcast.  I was also nervous, terrified and highly caffeinated.  We talk about two of my favorite films, The Docks of New York and Morocco, along with von Sternberg’s final film, The Saga of Anatahan.  Give it a listen here at Reel Time or download it through iTunes.

One thing I forgot to mention is this quote from the end of a great essay on von Sternberg by Tag Gallagher at Senses of Cinema:

“Of one thing there is no doubt: Morocco reaffirms the magic of the movies, makes everything else look worn and faded, like a hot summer sunrise in the middle of a cold winter night.”

This Week in Rankings

The Docks of New York – 1, 1928
Morocco – 1, 1930
Blonde Venus – 11, 1932
The Devil is a Woman – 2, 1935
Crime & Punishment – 15, 1935
A Day in the Country – 7, 1936
The King Steps Out – 27, 1936

The Saga of Anatahan – 12, 1953
12 Angry Men – 63, 1957
Golden Swallow – 12, 1968
5 Shaolin Masters – 12, 1974

Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood – 46, 2005

Quick Thoughts On Rewatching 12 Angry Men

Hey, that guy!
And that guy!
Why are those guys yelling?

Isn’t it nice how everyone changes their verdict in order of their likability as human beings?  The last four are the racist, angry dad, robot capitalist and wishy-washy ad guy while the first four to vote not guilty are liberal superman in the white linen suit, super nice old man, nice quiet guy from the slums and I Believe In America immigrant guy.

There’s no way any of this would be allowed to take place in a real jury room, would it?  Let me check the wikipedia. . . .

(Sonia Sotomayor) told the audience of law students that, as a lower-court judge, she would sometimes instruct juries to not follow the film’s example, because most of the jurors’ conclusions are based on speculation, not fact.  Sotomayor noted that events such as Juror 8 entering a similar knife into the proceeding, doing outside research into the case matter in the first place, and ultimately the jury as a whole making broad, wide ranging assumptions far beyond the scope of reasonable doubt (such as the inferences regarding the “Old Woman” wearing glasses) would never be allowed to occur in a real life jury situation, and would in fact have yielded a mistrial.

Is it OK to have a courtroom drama with a criminally bad defense attorney if the characters talk about how bad they think the defense attorney is?  This can’t have been that difficult a case to handle, right?  Isn’t checking if the eyewitnesses wear glasses taught on the first day of criminal trials 101?

It would have been interesting if the film actually dealt with race.  I mean, everyone turning their backs on racist guy’s hate speech is nice and all (let’s all ignore racism!  that’ll shame it into going away!), but the kid in question isn’t even specifically ethnic at all.  I thought he looked Greek or Italian, wikipedia says he’s often Puerto Rican.  I guess twelve white guys sitting in judgement on a black kid from the slums would have raised more complicated issues in 1957.  Edge of the City at least tried.

The acting’s good, I guess.  Fonda doing his Fonda thing.  Maybe one of his 15 best performances.  I dug Martin Balsam as the whiny foreman, especially in the beginning.  I lost interest in his “hey this is a play so i get to give a speech now” speech though.  Lee J. Cobb once again does Lee J. Cobb things.  I wonder if there’s a movie with Lee J. Cobb and Rod Steiger together.  That’d be one exciting bit of showy method shouting, wouldn’t it?  E. G. Marshall I liked the best, but that’s probably just because he was forced to underplay, seeing as his character was an android.

Ebert quotes Lumet’s book on filmmaking as to the techniques he used to increase the claustrophobia and tension as the film goes on (camera moves from above to eye level to below through the film; lens changes shrink the perceived space).  That’s cool, I guess.  Contrivances like that would be more effective if the script wasn’t already so tightly schematic.  I feel the claustrophobia and suffocation not from the closeness of the space, or the heat of the simulated day, but from the airlessness of the screenplay.  It’s so tightly controlled, all in the service of its hit-you-over-the-head message that there’s no room to breathe.  No spontaneity, no reality.  The film has a lesson it wants me to learn and it won’t let me leave until my brain’s been pounded to mush.

That even might be OK if it was an interesting lesson.  But no, the message is “Jury trials are swell!  See how great humans can be when they get together and talk!  All we need to do to defeat evil and prejudice and hatred is talk it out, man!”  Not only is that wrong, it isn’t even particularly close to true.  Well, juries are swell, that’s true.  Yay America!  For adopting a legal custom dating back thousands of years and codified in the English-speaking world for 800 years!  USA!  The rest is a liberal pipe dream that only works in the scenario because it stacks the deck so egregiously by making evil ugly, stupid and incompetent.