Taiwan/Japan, 1996

Starring Jack Kao. In Mandarin and Taiwanese, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable 

You have to search out the rhythm of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1996 feature Goodbye South, Goodbye. And this can be challenging, so austere and unsteady does that rhythm seem at first. But the film will wait for you with a mysterious patience. Your focus will reveal Hou’s own.

Part of the director’s reputation as a leading figure in Taiwan’s cinematic New Wave rests on his use of long, static takes. His camera often sits without blinking for minutes at a time, leaving the eye to wander among the tics and flickering facial expressions, the plain, jumbled details of rooms and streets.

In Goodbye South, Goodbye, this stillness is sometimes near-smothering.

About half-an-hour in, for example, the main characters converge on a cramped apartment where one of them, a young woman named Pretzel (played by singer Annie Shizuka Inoh), has just attempted suicide.

She lies on a bed near the edge of the frame, half-obscured by the movements of the others in the bland light. The white bandage on her wrist is just another part of the clutter. It’s as if the camera’s refusal to react becomes one more blank circumstance holding these people in the depleted place that life has assigned them, one more silent limit.

Over a brooding, occasionally ear-scuffing rock score, Goodbye South, Goodbye follows Gao (Jack Kao), a man improvising on the line between regular life and the criminal underworld. With him is a lanky younger sidekick, Flatty (Taiwanese electronic musician Lim Giong), whose constant fidgeting gnaws at his air of punk vacancy.

Hou is as sparing with back story as he is with edits, but while the two men go about setting up illicit gambling dens and scams involving the sale of hogs, the staring lens hints at lives spent scrambling for a way out.

As sure as fate, these baffled ambitions draw Gao and Flatty into the sights of ruthless cops and shady politicians, men well-practiced in violence for the sake of protecting an advantage. The sense of threat that had been floating in the film’s background suddenly takes clear shape.

Hypnotic, excellently acted, and tense on its own enigmatic terms, Goodbye South, Goodbye will stay with you in the way lived experience does.

Goodbye South, Goodbye screens as part of Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien at the Cinematheque on Friday (February 27) and Thursday (March 5)