A bar-girl turned actress becomes more and more involved with the film role she is rehearsing and the film journeys back and forth between the actress's world and the world within the film. The role she plays is that of a real life heroine of the anti-Japanese war who is later prosecuted for her left wing activism in Taiwan. I am very fond of those scenes in Good Men Good Women where Liang Jing's diary is stolen, and the other party faxes page after page of her diary back to her. As a result, she is forced to review the past.
Memory suddenly becomes all too real, particularly when it is revealed by modern technology.
The film within a film is the medium. Black and white, colour, monochromatic film, take turns to engage with each other. They bear witness to Hou Hsiao-hsien falling victim to temptation and trying his hand once again in making an elegy about the city after his failed attempt with Daughter of the Nile . By resorting to the device of a film within a film, he can mingle in a drama of the countryside which is, all along, his strong point. Thereafter, jumping from the age of the written word to the age of the fax machine, he integrates a dialectic between alienation and liberation.