Some friends dragged me to a showing of “Three Times” at the New York Film Festival the other night. I say ‘dragged’ because it was a weeknight (and I’m a big baby about foreign language films that clock in at well over 2 hrs. and start at 9 p.m. and are three subway trains away from my apartment--insert your own crybaby sound here) and because I’m unfamiliar with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s earlier films.
“Three Times” is three love stories in three time periods in twentieth-century Taiwan. The film opens in 1966 where two young people, a billiard hall hostess and a patron, strike up a romance with hardly a word uttered between them. This is the sweetest, most sentimental vignette in the trilogy and the direction is gorgeous. The camera floats around the pool players, the roll and bump of brightly colored balls, and the connections between chance, fate, and love are dreamily clear.
It is both a strength and a weakness that the same actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen, play the roles of the lovers in each time period. Though their performances are excellent, reinforcing the timelessness of the characters' struggles in this way feels a bit hokey. Fortunately, I think the film’s overall visual subtlety overcomes this stridency.
The second vignette is set in a 1911 brothel where Qi is a courtesan and Chen her wealthy lover. Communication in these shadowy scenes is abundant but we’re never allowed to hear their voices as the dialogue is displayed--literally written out--on 1920’s film style intertitles. It’s an effective way of depriving these people of their “voices,” and rendering them powerless. Ironically, their passions too in this setting are held in check by the revolutionary politics of the outside world (for him) and the politics of sexual servitude (for her).
The film concludes with a tedious story set in rocking modern day Taipei between Chen, now a photographer, and his present obsession, Qi, a bisexual epileptic chanteuse. You get the picture.
Variations on a theme, yes, and often visually beautiful—but that’s about it. I’m not any more enlightened about love or life or Taiwan now than before; I’ve just seen a few pretty pictures. My friends feel that this is not Hou's best work and recommend I see “Flowers of Shanghai” and “Millennium Mambo,” which they say are twice as good as "Three Times."
