- English name：Goodbye South, Goodbye
- Broadcast time：September 6, 1996
- Starring：高捷（Jack Kao）、林强（Lim Giong）、伊能静（Annie Shizuka Inou）、徐贵樱（Kuei-Ying Hsu）、喜翔（Hsiang Hsi）、高鸣（Gao Ming）
- director：侯孝贤（Hou Hsiao-hsien）
Introduction
Today, I will introduce a Chinese film which called Goodbye South (南国再见nán guó zài jiàn). So let us have a brief introduction.
Goodbye South, Goodbye is a 1996 film directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien (侯孝贤Hóu Xiàoxián).
Plot
Gao (Jack Kao) is riding the train to Pinghsi (平溪乡Píngxī Xiāng) to set up a 10 day gambling den with his friend Hsi (Hsi Hsiang). He taking his acolyte – Flatty (Lim Giong), and Pletzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh), Flatty’s girl friend, who works part time in a night club. Gao’s girl friend Ying (Hsu Kuei-Ying), who works in the same night club as Pletzel, doesn’t like the people around Gao, finding them dangerous. But Gao has already made a deal with Hsi to invest in a nightclub in Shanghai. Ying doesn’t want him to go. She wants him to stay in Taiwan to open a restaurant. A succession of get-rich-quick schemes leads them only to the brink of disaster. In the course of the film the unsavory alliance between the underworld and the political elite emerges.
This is a very fabulous film.
Professional evaluation
1、Compared with the previous two films, Goodbye Southland is a work with great ambitions and a long history. The film returns to the field of life that Hou Hsiao-hsien is more proficient in and more private, and is more real and more natural. The film is about the marginalized people in Taiwan. Returning to Taiwan, the perspective is deeper, the characters are closer, and the level of thinking is richer than before, showing the ups and downs of society.
2、This 1996 film is very avant-garde, has no script, and is similar to a road movie. Film critic Wen Tianxiang said that “Goodbye Southland, Southland” is a direct and real film.
3、Director Hou Hsiao-hsien used the survival status of Taiwan’s underworld to reflect the living conditions of the people at the bottom of Taiwanese society. The movie seems to be only narrating some trivial matters of life, but it is undercurrent. Oriental people value the relationship with relatives and friends more than anything else. The responsibility to relatives is like the top priority in most people’s lives, which also leads to complex interpersonal relationships in society. Director Hou Hsiao-hsien inserted many “absurd” details in the film. For example, at the end of the movie, the two gangster brothers drove their car down the ridge of the field, and the street lights at the far end of the camera happened to be extinguished at this time; the two gangster brothers went to southern Taiwan to negotiate with local government officials who collected land taxes and dealt with various favors.
