Good Men Good Women

Just saw this movie, which balances the story of an actress preparing for the role of Chiang Bi-Yu, a Taiwanese revolutionary active in the anti-Japanese resistance in the 1940s China, and a Communist party member in 1950s Taiwan, with that of Bi-Yu herself. The film operates on three levels, as the actress is also confronted with her own past as a man who has stolen her diary faxes her pages daily. These pages telll of her tumultous past with a Taiwanese gangster. Hou Hsiao-Hsien slowly weaves these disparate threads slowly into his film, offering no explanation and forcing the viewer to piece the stories together. The character of the actress, and the character for which she prepares to play, are juxtaposed, as the actress sees herself in the recent past, and herself in the role of her character in the more distant past of Taiwan's history. A fascinating film, Good Men Good Women, while slow, rewards patient viewing, and is worth seeing again from the beginning after the final frame to see how the stories influence each other, building towards the final few frames.