General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Good Men, Good Women

Good Men, Good Women (好男好女) is a 1995 Taiwanese-Japanese drama film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, the last installment of his Taiwan trilogy on modern Taiwanese history, after A City of Sadness (1989) and The Puppetmaster (1993).¹^•² Written by Chu Tien-wen from Lan Bo-chou's novel Sapporo Carriage Song (幌馬車之歌), it tells the story of White Terror victims Chung Hao-tung and his wife Chiang Bi-yu through the eyes of a 1990s actress preparing to play Chiang on screen.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / screenwriter	Hou Hsiao-hsien; screenplay by Chu Tien-wen³
Source	Lan Bo-chou's novel Sapporo Carriage Song (幌馬車之歌)³
Production	1995, Taiwan and Japan co-production, 108 minutes, color¹
Cast	Annie Shizuka Inoh, Jack Kao, Lim Giong²
Festival	Official competition, 48th Cannes Film Festival, 1995²
Golden Horse Awards	32nd Golden Horse Awards: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (Chu Tien-wen), Best Sound (Tu Du-chih)⁵
Other awards	1996 Asia-Pacific Film Festival Best Director and Best Art Direction; 1995 Hawaii International Film Festival Best Film; 1995 Changchun Film Festival Best Film⁶

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film is built from three strands in different times and places.⁶ In present-day Taipei, the actress Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) has her diary stolen by an unknown man who telephones her repeatedly without speaking and sends her pages of the diary by fax.⁷ She is rehearsing for the lead in a film-within-the-film, also called Good Men, Good Women, about the real-life couple Chung Hao-tung and Chiang Bi-yu, who left Taiwan in the late 1930s to fight as anti-Japanese guerrillas in China and were arrested as political subversives on their return to the island.⁷^•⁸ A third strand is Liang Ching's own memory of a past love affair with her boyfriend Ah Wei (Jack Kao), who was shot dead.⁶^•⁹

As shooting proceeds, Liang Ching begins to identify with Chiang Bi-yu, and the film moves between the two women in a to-and-fro between 1995 and the 1940s, between color and black and white, and between personal destiny and collective memory.⁹^•⁸ The historical material is presented only in fragments; the weight of the narrative rests on the modern actress's story, and the film-within-the-film appears in pieces rather than as a continuous period drama.¹

Historical subject

The historical core is drawn from real people. Chung Hao-tung and Chiang Bi-yu were victims of Taiwan's White Terror, the period of political persecution under martial law; the story is adapted from the true experiences of a group of victims of that era.²^•³ The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute places the film in a sequence with A City of Sadness (1989), which first brought the 228 incident and the White Terror to the screen after 38 years of martial law, and Wan Jen's Super Citizen Ko (1995), as films that transform and reinterpret historical trauma.⁴

Production and reception

The film was co-produced by Hou's company with a Japanese team led by producer Kazuyoshi Okuyama, and distributed in Japan by Shochiku Fuji.¹ It opened in Taiwan on October 7, 1995 and in Japan on December 9, 1995.²^•¹ Chen Hwai-en was the cinematographer, Liao Ching-song the editor, and Tu Du-chih the sound recordist.⁸^•⁵

At the 32nd Golden Horse Awards in 1995 the film won Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay for Chu Tien-wen, and Best Sound for Tu Du-chih, with nominations for Best Actress and Best Editing.⁵^•³ It was Hou's second Golden Horse Award for Best Director.¹⁰ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 100% Tomatometer rating from five critics.¹¹

Place in Hou's career

The film marks new technical directions for Hou, and its metafictional reflection on historical writing aligned with the 1990s Taiwanese interest in deconstruction and metahistory.²^•¹² Critics have also noted that it brought a history of the Taiwanese left-wing movement into a public discussion otherwise structured around a binary opposition of unification versus independence.¹² The Harvard Film Archive describes Hou's work of this period as circulating between present and past, with Good Men, Good Women as an early example alongside Three Times (2005).¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026