Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye rolled back onto the big screen at the 64th New York Film Festival in a new 4K restoration, and it still moves like nothing else.
The 1996 drama made its North American restoration premiere Oct. 7 at the Walter Reade Theater in the festival’s Revivals section, where Film at Lincoln Center gathers restored and rediscovered work. It is an easy film to summarize and a hard one to shake.
Goodbye South, Goodbye, Photo Credits: NYFF
Gao (Jack Kao) is a small-time gangster with more plans than money. There is a gambling den to set up in Pingxi, a business in Shanghai he keeps promising to open and a scheme to sell pigs to the government. Trailing him are Flatty (Lim Giong), a hothead who turns every errand into a fight, and Flatty’s girlfriend, Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh), who piles up debts faster than anyone can cover them. Gao’s own girlfriend, Ying (Hsu Kuei-ying), watches the new faces crowd into his life and quietly weighs a future somewhere else.
None of the schemes pays off, and Hou builds the film on rhythm rather than suspense. It keeps swinging between motion and stillness: a train easing through the hills, a car nosing down a country road, then long, fixed takes in cramped rooms where people cook, bicker and wait for a phone to ring. Those long scenes play almost like documentary, with the audience simply watching it all happen. The most famous passage sends all three leads up a green mountain road on scooters while Lim’s music takes over the soundtrack. For a few minutes, three people going nowhere look completely free.
Goodbye South, Goodbye, Photo Credits: NYFF
That push and pull is the film’s portrait of Taiwan in the mid-’90s, a place where everyone has an angle and a cellphone and nobody has a foothold. Hou never scolds his characters or flatters them. Kao plays Gao as a man who is worn out and still unable to stop hustling, and the performance gets funnier and sadder as it goes. For a director with a reputation for austerity, this is a loose, loud and often very funny film.
It was also a turn toward the present for Hou after years spent on Taiwan’s past. When it competed at Cannes in 1996, he described it as an attempt to “create a new rhythm, different from my previous films,” according to Variety. Thirty years later, that rhythm still feels new.
Goodbye South, Goodbye, Photo Credits: NYFF
The Chinese title says more than the English one. 南國再見，南國 translates directly as “South Country, Goodbye, South Country,” and the film lives up to each part of it. Gao and his crew spend much of the story heading south out of Taipei, chasing one deal after another through the countryside. Nearly everyone is planning an exit, Gao toward Shanghai and Ying overseas. The title circles back to the south after its goodbye, and nobody in the film gets out either.
The restoration was scanned in 4K from the 35mm original camera negative, according to the festival, and Janus Films is handling the release. It arrives with extra weight. Hou’s family announced his retirement in 2023, which leaves revivals like this one as the way new audiences will meet him.
Goodbye South, Goodbye asks for patience and pays it back in full. It screens again Oct. 8 at the Howard Gilman Theater and Oct. 11 at the Francesca Beale Theater.
Check out the trailer for “Goodbye South, Goodbye” below.
