Three Times

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.

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.

Because this movie takes patience and doesn't depend on the usual understanding of plot and character, it's been under-appreciated, in my opinion. The opening segment takes place in the Sixties, followed by a trip into the past in the next segment, and into the future, i.e. the present, in the last. Because the same actors appear as lovers in all three, the movie invites us to compare historical interpretations of love and life, as well as see what is continuous in all three. Nothing much "happens" in any of the three, though there are small stories in each; the meaning of the movie lies in the sensibility and sensuous effects of each historical section. The beauty and dignity of the 1911 section is contrasted with the repulsiveness of the contemporary urban, industrialized and technological landscape, yet the modern women have a freedom that the heroine of the 1911 section could not dream about. The treatment of love is serious, yet also playful; love songs, love letters and smoking (tea a century ago) are all customs and codes of romance movies that are used ironically here. All in all, a masterful and interesting movie, but not for those who want fast-paced thrills.

Tonight, a friend and I saw the critically acclaimed "Three Times" at a local theatre. The description that the theatre's site had posted is:

'The film features three different stories of love and memory through three time periods, 1966, 1911 and 2005. The first, "A Time for Love," hinges on the meeting of soldier boy Chen with pool hall hostess May and his subsequent search for her. The second episode, "A Time for Freedom," deals with a courtesan tending to a Mr. Chang during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. And the third episode, "A Time for Youth," centers on epileptic singer Jing who casually takes up with photographer Zhen while increasingly ignoring her female lover.'

Neither of us left the film understanding what the commotion could have been about. We both reasonably enjoyed the episode taking place in 1966 - it is sweet and innocent, and all the characters seemed happy. In the 1911 episode, the characters were all imprisoned by duty-bound roles, and happiness was not readily apparent. In the gritty modern 2005 final episode, all trace of innocence and happiness seemed to be whisked away in the detritus of the modern anonymous city.

The best scene for me was in the first part; in the sweet romance blooming between our two protagonists, Chen (played by Chen Chang) reaches his hand down slowly to clasp the hand of May (Qi Shu). But rather than enjoy many such touching scenes, I was left a bit puzzled by the dearth of interest, to me, in the rest of the film.

I had expected that Hsia-hsien Hou, cited as filming subtle scenes of beauty, would have cleverly used the three parallel histories, perhaps weaving them and interchanging them nonlinearly, or somehow relating them. All I saw was the coincidental use of two characters in love stories of three different eras. The film was slow; if it were entirely to have taken place in the 1960s, I could have described "slow" with more positive phrases, such as, perhaps, "subtly engaging" or "innocently unwinding" or maybe even "softly touching". I would give the film 5 1/2 or 6 stars out of 10.

--Dilip Barman, Durham, NC, Friday, August 4, 2006 (quote from Carolina Theatre, Durham NC website)