Zui hao de shi guang

Interestingly enough, two elites of contemporary Chinese directors have presented their latest nostalgic works between 2004 and 2005. Compared to Wong Kar-wai's hybrid style and inscrutable cinematic codes in last year's 2046, Hou Hsiao Hsien's new masterpiece Three times in this year's Cannes is distinctly built on a three-episode structure and simply reminiscent of his chefs-d'oeuvre from his different golden ages.

The first episode "A time for love" is obviously associated with Hou's earlier works in 1980s. Set in Taiwan's snooker parlor in 1960s, a nostalgic aura infused with youthful vigor and adolescent impulse successfully recurred in Hou's stylish, experienced long-shots. The subtle relationship between the two main characters was getting clear with repetition of the Taiwanese old songs and western pops Smoke gets in your eyes, The Beatles' Rain and tears. This episode contains Director's real experiences and was rendered the most accessible of the three stories.

The second episode "A time for freedom" reminds me of his acclaimed classic Flower of Shanghai. Similar backgrounds, characters, chamber settings, fastidious costume designs refer to the identical tragic theme: Historically and emotionally lost. The surprise comes from the narration, which is dealt with in the form of silent movies. What struck me more is Shu Qi's weepy performance of those ancient elegies in an incomprehensible language.

The last episode "A time for youth" drew me back to the contemporary Taiwan in 2005. This episode is shockingly flooded with a variety of Generation-X's stuff such as e-mails, blog, cellar messages, trance music, digital camera, drugs, epilepsy etc., and also focused upon a group of aimless and hopeless younger animals, center of whom is a premature girl played by Shu Qi. Reminiscent of Millennium Mambo, also starring amazing Shu Qi as the key character, this story is loosely predicted on a girl whose relationship between her homosexual lover and a young male camera is morbidly and unapologetically intertwined. It's hard to conjecture why the director chose such an extraordinary story here as a representation of the contemporary society. Utilization of all kinds of most up-dated symbols has, however, proved his master touch in exactly presenting the loneliness, aimlessness and helplessness of the X-Generation living in the new century.

As the best actress in 2005's Golden Horse Award, Shu Qi's portrait of three women from different times is so convincing and laudable that she is totally competent for more difficult characters.

I must admit that I fall asleep twice during the "Second Time", the 1911, but, still, the film has some things that can make it really interesting. Here are two of them: I specially liked the use of the light in the different stories. The light itself talks and tells us how the director feels about each of the periods he describes. Well, I can't talk that much about the second one but the 1966 one and the 2005 story are clear examples of this. The light in the first "time" is a warm light, an innocent one...the colors are soft and confident under that light. Like their love. On the other hand, the light from the final part is cold, blue, distant...it doesn't invite us to join the experiences the characters are living as the one in the first part does. I guess the director becomes the light in this movie...it's the point of view, the subjective eye in the film.

There is another thing I liked a lot in "Three times": the role of communication. In the first time, 1966, there are a lot of handwritten letters, few face-to-face words and delicate skin-to-skin and eye-to-eye contacts. In the Second part, it's mainly conversations. And in the 2005, when the characters are provided with a wide range of communication gadgets, communication seems even more difficult...(the scene with her crying in the motorbike and him asking if she's OK is extremely good in expressing this contradiction of the nowadays world: fast motorbikes, sms, e-mails, pictures...and still we are not able to express our most important feelings!) All in all, and in spite of the fact that the second part of "Three Times" might be too slow, there are a couple of interesting things to see in this film. However I must say that it is not a film for everyone and nor for every moment!

Shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2005.

Hou fans, a serious bunch, will be delighted with the chronological and sociological ambition of "Three Times"; for me it drifted gently downhill after "time" one, a wonderfully touching, minimalist love story about a soldier and a pool hall girl in 1966. The second "time" ("Dadaodeng: a Time for Freedom") is 1911, and to evoke the period Hou shoots the film as a silent with piano music and inter-titles and the subject of a brothel and buying courtesans as concubines -- complicated by a story of going off to fight for freedom -- resembles Hou's cumulatively richer full-length brothel saga, "Flowers of Shanghai," which is easier to follow. "Time" three is now, and Hou lays on the contemporaneity with a trowel: you've got tattoos and cell phones and text messaging and motorcycles and epilepsy and lesbian lovers and smog and nightclub singing... and it all ends chaotically... like contemporary life, I guess. Each period segment has a composedly different style but, number three, "2005: Taipei: A Time for Youth" seems the least uniquely Hou of the three. It takes off from Hou's "Millennium Mambo," but the material has been dealt with in more original fashion by Wong Kar Wai and Olivier Assayas and many others.

What justifies the three segments and makes them interact with each other is the use of the same two actors, the tough but tender Chang Chen and the "impossibly glamorous" Shu Qi as the man and woman for each period. Seeing how they are transformed each time conveys Hou's essential message that we are entirely formed by the period we live in. Everything in the film is ravishing to look at, but it's the shyness of the couple in "time" one ("1966, Kaosiung: A Time for Love") that stole my heart. The final scene, where the girl and boy just sip tea and look at each other and smile and nervously laugh and fall in love, seemed more authentic and present and fresh than probably anything else in the whole film festival at Lincoln Center this year. When Hou hits it, he flies to the moon.

THREE TIMES (Zui hao de shi guang) is so frank a film that the viewer may get lost looking for the hidden meanings in this century traversal of lovers' interactions in China. Not one for simple linear film-making, director Hsiao-hsien Hou instead opts for mood and suggestion and leaves the paucity of dialog to make room for emotional involvement and response. Three periods - 1966 A Time for Love, 1911 A Time for Freedom, and 2005 A Time for Youth - are depicted with the same main characters, Qi Shu and Chen Chang, who prove to be exceptionally sensitive to the concept from the director: with each new tale these fine actors mold new characters and questions and yet allow us to see a line of similarity in the couples as the director has suggested.

The film wisely opens with the most successful of the three 'Times' - 1966 A Time for Love - - tracing the emergence of timid passion between a lad headed for the military and a young girl who works in a pool hall. They communicate by letters after their first brief introductory encounter and circumstances interfere with the progress of their relationship in 1966 Taiwan. The middle section 1911 A Time for Freedom is gorgeous visually and conceptually the director has elected to use the cinematic form of the period (silent movie) to tell his story about the freeing of a young girl from the grip of a brothel madam and surveys the political tensions between Japan and China as the quietly lighted story of love and yearning unfolds. The film ends with 2005 A Time for Youth and here our lovers are caught up in the pollution of smog, cellphones, emails, nightclubs, and infidelities for same sex affairs that speak loudly about the tenor of the times.

Hsiao-hsien Hou's films are an acquired taste and many will find the choppy editing, the fragmentary scenes that are not always well focused for the story line, and the over-long length (130 minutes) too much to endure. But the ideas are fresh and the characters and vignettes are memorable, and most of the major critics in the media have lavished praise on this film. It is an interesting work but for this viewer there are enough flaws to keep it grounded. Grady Harp

My girlfriend is always complaining that I rent gory, hateful Italian horror movies like 'Strip Naked For Your Killer' and 'Cannibal Holocaust', so I figured I'd switch it up and introduce her to the wild world of Hou. I should have stuck with 'Strip Naked...'! She complained the entire time that the film was too slow, that the characters were too vague and the whole thing, well, 'sucked'.

In my opinion, this was a graceful, magnificent film, but it is, what I like to call a 'Phantom Masterpiece' that is, a film which culminates a director's many obsessions, but doesn't really have that special punch that makes masterwork status unequivocal. I felt 'In the Mood For Love' by Wong Kar-Wai was a similar disappointment when compared to his 'true' masterpieces 'Happy Together', 'Chungking Express' and 'Fallen Angels'.

So, while you're right to expect a lot from this movie, don't expect a 'Flowers of Shanghai'.

Regardless, I found this film very fascinating, and one viewer's comment on IMDb about the film as a meta film is interesting, especially when you consider that framing shots of different actors in different times and places are virtually identical sequence to sequence. For instance, when a woman opens a letter, she's shot from exactly the same vantage point every time, regardless of the origins of the letter or herself. Its just too idiosyncratic to not be meaningful.

Also, a lot of this film is playfully back lit as characters are reduced almost to shadows for much of the action, however, as they move through the frame, light finds them and its really quite incredible.

If you are a true film fan, or a fan or Ozu, Haneke, Bresson, or Antonioni, you'll love this.