Goodbye South, Goodbye is a 1996 Taiwanese drama film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. The film had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on 12 May 1996.

Plot

Gao (Jack Kao) rides the train to Pinghsi to set up a 10-day gambling den with his friend Hsi (Hsi Hsiang). He takes his acolyte Flatty (Lim Giong) and Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh), Flatty's girlfriend, who works part-time in a night club. Gao's girlfriend Ying (Hsu Kuei-Ying) works in the same night club as Pretzel and doesn't like the people around Gao, finding them dangerous. Gao has already made a deal with Hsi to invest in a nightclub in Shanghai, but Ying doesn't want him to go. Instead, she wants him to stay in Taiwan to open a restaurant. A succession of get-rich-quick schemes leads them to the brink of disaster. Throughout the course of the film the unsavory alliance between the underworld and the political elite emerges.

Cast

Production

The film includes remarkably long takes.

Soundtrack

The film's soundtrack was released in Taiwan by Magic Stone in 1996, as well as in Japan by Soundtrack Listeners Communications on March 21, 1997.

Reception

Goodbye South, Goodbye was entered into the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, but lost to Secrets & Lies.

Critical response

The film was chosen along with The Bridges of Madison County and Carlito's Way as the best film of the 1990s by Cahiers du cinéma. Director Luca Guadagnino also listed it as one of his 10 favorite films in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll.

Analysis

A retrospective review explained: "Goodbye South, Goodbye was the first present-day-set film Hou made since Daughter of the Nile, nine years earlier. (Good Men, Good Women, made before Goodbye South, Goodbye, partly took place in the past.) In two movies since then—Millennium Mambo and Three Times—Hou has cast a sad-eyed gaze upon modern Taiwan. In all of them, Taiwanese youth are depicted as listless wastrels, addicted to distraction and unmoored from their past. His long takes don’t capture time spent so much as time squandered."