Abstract:

Based on the novel by Chiang, Pi-yu. The concluding film in Hou's trilogy on the modern history of Taiwan that includes "A City of Sadness" and "The Puppetmaster", Good Men, Good Women unveils its story on three narrative levels. A film actress starts receiving faxed pages of the diary she kept during her days as a barmaid, when she was the mistress of a gangster. At the same time, she is preparing to play Chiang Bi-yu, an anti-Japanese resistance fighter who fell victim in the 1950's to Taiwan's "white terror" of paranoia and political persecution. Thus the film slips back and forth between the ordinary present, the actress's romantic past and the film-within-a-film. Includes public performance rights.