Shot/Reverse Shot: Three Times
Shot by Andrew Tracy
Reverse Shot by Michael Koresky

I worried that I might have to surrender my cinephile credentials if I confessed that I’ve never much cared—nor, I’m quite certain, shall I ever care more—for the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, but the confession is necessary: neither for provocation nor repentance, but simply because anything I have to say about his latest, Three Times, will be spurred by that knee-jerk. It’s a handicap as much as a boon for critics that we inevitably filter our private, unmediated pleasures and biases into the public, structured forum of words and reasoning, of justification. This is not to say that those immediate sensations are any more “genuine” than their eventual articulation. In my case, initially quite negative gut responses to films as diverse as Fata Morgana, The Last Movie, and Twentynine Palms crystallized into great admiration once filtered through the ol’ cortex, when their respectively soporific, laugh-inducing, and shamelessly shocking effects had been disassociated from mere sensation into an understanding of how and why they were inducing those effects.

For Hou, however, the gut has refused to yield any ground. No matter that I acknowledge his films’ beauty (the highest form of beauty, that which issues from a way of seeing), their reconceptions of cinematic (and extra-cinematic) time and space, their engagement with the shaping hand of history and its effects upon the present, nothing changes the fact that they leave me almost completely unmoved, emotionally or intellectually. There are moments, of course—the coincidence of four trains in Café Lumière, the Dear John letter in Dust in the Wind, the final breakdown on the phone in Good Men, Good Women—as well as admiration for certain films’ overall historical/aesthetic projects (City of Sadness and Good Men, Good Women). But for this viewer, these are no more than slight gradations on an otherwise flat plain, and while their microscopic delicacy is certainly evident of Hou’s craftsmanship, they seem quite out of proportion to the almost unanimous proclamations of mastery. Oh well ­ I’m sure there are many who wouldn’t share my rapture at the sound of a phone charger hitting the floor at the beginning of the Dardennes’ L’Enfant.

So Three Times: three eras (1966, 1911 and 2005), two actors (Shu Qi of Hou’s Millennium Mambo and—lest we forget—The Transporter, and Edward Yang, Wong Kar-wai and Ang Lee veteran Chang Chen) playing out three different love affairs in one troubled country. The opener, “A Time for Love,” takes place in a series of provincial pool halls, as a young man recently called up for military service meets (briefly) and pursues (extendedly) a hostess with whom he spent one friendly, sexless night. A delightful surprise, for these eyes at least: the first Hou film (or part of a film) that I’ve actually enjoyed, the habitual opacity of character and distended pacing perfectly suiting the utter arbitrariness—and thus the monumental importance—of the fragile bond between these drifting, wholly recognizable people. The Platters’ “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and Aphrodite’s Child’s “Rain and Tears” on the soundtrack, a shared umbrella in the rain, an achingly tentative grasping of hands while awaiting the bus that will separate them again, and forever—it’s all lovely.

“A Time for Freedom,” its dialogue conveyed in silent film intertitles, shifts to Flowers of Shanghai territory, a brothel where a dissident intellectual seeking Taiwan’s liberation from the Japanese romances a prostitute whose own inescapable social entrapment hovers unspoken within their guarded, and ultimately impossible love. Lovely as well, especially with that lonely piano accompaniment, but the drag has begun to set in. “A Time for Youth” heads to the modern day, as Qi’s epileptic, drugged-up pop singer ricochets disinterestedly back and forth between male and female lovers. Millennium Mambo redux, and thus the most tiresome of the lot. While I’m retrospectively developing an appreciation for Hou’s remarkably tactile evocations of nightclub space and atmosphere, I’ve never been able to work up much empathy or interest for his disaffected Beautiful Young Moderns, and this Time is no exception. Like the majority of his work, Hou’s latest slips past my eyes leaving nary a trace of its passing, the slight changes in method that do register—the attentiveness to performance, rather than mere existence, which Hou directs to Qi and Chen (excellent throughout), and a correspondent loosening of Hou’s habitually distant camera to follow the movements of his actors ­ no more warranting extravagant praise than haughty dismissal.

Yet is it possible for a critic to express his disinterestedness in a major filmmaker and not enter into polemics? Can we simply state that these films do not affect us without either impugning a talented artist or goading his supporters into indignant defense? Doesn’t that “gut response” —with which I feebly cloaked my quite definite position in the guise of a natural, involuntary reaction—have nothing natural or involuntary about it; isn’t it, rather, a construction of thought, a definition of art’s abilities and boundaries, and thus a judgment upon the artistic worthiness of artist and artwork? Frankly—and here I escape again—I’d rather not think about it too much. I have too much respect for Hou, or rather for what others have been able to make of him, to carry his inessentialness to my own cinema cosmogony too far into the public arena. Criticism can’t help but be combative, but I’d rather pick my fights somewhere else.

The Hou Hsiao-hsien project—of fragmented history and abstracted memory, of floating cameras and infinite takes, of obscured motivations and unseen consequences—has the support of the entire cinema intelligentsia behind it, yet for all its visual and social richness, purposely makes its viewers into observers rather than participants. For all of Flowers of Shanghai’s suffocating ornate warmth, never have I felt anything other than left out in the cold, watching as its characters move through inexorably doomed trajectories with a helpless detachment. And though The Puppetmaster’s burnished, self-effacing, and ambitiously small detailing of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century is enthrallingly conceptualized—narration itself rather than dramatization becomes the main thrust, putting onscreen the tangential details other biopics would leave out while compartmentalizing the grand historical plot points into direct-address documentary-like interjections—the resulting viewing experience registers as purely intellectual rather than emotional.

There certainly is something to be said about the difference between “getting” a Hou Hsiao-hsien film and getting a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, yet his newest film, Three Times, throws all of my concerns into a void. Perhaps it’s the short-film form (for Three Times consists of three separate tales, each informed by the others in both appealingly superficial and intractably theoretical ways) that has unveiled for me Hou’s emotional center. Yet I’m more quick to assume that it’s just this particular film, and what it says about personal versus political histories, the ever-shifting placement of women within society, and sexual communication, that has somehow coalesced so much of Hou’s visionary strands. Overused words like rapturous and hypnotic certainly apply to Hou’s technique here, even as the film jumps between eras and political realities, yet there’s something so much greater and more challenging going on in Three Times than aesthetic control: by staying in a constant implicit dialogue with one another, both in narrative and historical modes, of politics as well as of cinema, all three stories become the tale of Taiwan, a palimpsest on which universal themes stand in for the reality of a single island as it’s passed from one imperialist ruler to the next—the history of his country written as a triad of minimalist romances.

Three Times begins in 1966, lushly, with an elegant, awe-inspiring little glide down from a vaporous hanging lamp to a pool table as a group of attractive rural youths clutching cue sticks encircle the lightly rolling colored balls; one after another has his or her turn, while Hou’s camera, as drifting yet concise as ever, moves effortlessly from game table to the distracted glances of the players. Most striking in this crowd is luscious, full-lipped, and impossibly gorgeous Shu Qi, Taiwanese pin-up and central figure in all three of Hou’s tales. It’s Shu Qi’s visage (and how it reacts to differing forms of social and sexual containment) on which Hou will hang all three tales as they unfold back to back. Yet here in this opener, “A Time for Love,” her glamorous and indifferent introduction is as deceptive as that hazy, Wong Kar-wai-­ish gauzy filter that’s laid over every shot. Earnest local boy Chang Chen falls for her before being shipped off for military service; upon his return he finds his beloved no longer an employee of the pool hall he had frequented and in her place another girl of similar age and beauty. In trying to track her down, he dashes from town to town, only to find in each village in which she had been rumored to have taken up work that she is replaced by another pretty young woman. Their eventual reunion and subsequent simple expression of mutual burgeoning love (a lovely hand-hold in the rain before he must be shipped off to the base at 9 a.m.), ends the first “Time” on a reconciliatory note that the following two “Times” will not only circumvent but also conceptually deny. And in retrospect from the political and social tangles of the other stories, the overly aestheticized innocence of “A Time for Love” gives off a whiff of odd conventionality. Permeated by the constant replaying of romantic pop tunes (The Platters’ “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” Aphrodite’s Child’s “Rain and Tears”), the languor seems ultimately insufficient in the face of such complex national history.

Shu Qi’s exquisite work in the second chapter, “A Time for Freedom,” lays bare the shortsighted romanticization of what came before it. This masterfully modulated work of art, set in 1911 and told as a silent film, complete with delicately ornate intertitle cards (which at first register as charming gimmickry yet soon become completely conceptually inextricable from the narrative) and a heartbreakingly quiet piano accompaniment, might take its style and setting cues from Flowers of Shanghai, but it has a visual and emotional power all its own. Here, Shu Qi’s courtesan is frequently visited by Chang Chen’s radical newspaper man, a revolutionary who fights for Taiwanese release from imperialist Japanese rule when not in her arms. As usual, Hou’s camera moves delicately from character to character, from Shu Qi to Chang Chen and back again, picking up on the slightest expression of underlying passion, whether it be politically or romantically anchored. So overwhelmingly quiet and meticulously designed is this scenario, and so unassumingly does its narrative power creep up on you, that Hou’s firm grasp on the blind spots of political engagement might not make itself immediately apparent. Yet Shu Qi’s courtesan remains in her own emotional and social bondage while her seemingly devoted lover speaks of Taiwanese freedom; in the actress’s face we see years of emotional enslavement, compounded by the tragic yet matter-of-factly presented subplot of a 10-year-old girl being primed for the life of a courtesan and possible concubine. Hou’s point, told gently and refracted through the sigh of a love story, that grandiose political gestures often occur at the expense of the individuals still toiling away in their workaday social realities, comes across effortlessly—and puts to shame the finger-wagging grandstanding of the more self-consciously political Manderlay, in which Lars von Trier similarly proposes that international relations cannot be resolved until a country first corrects its own domestic policies. Yet where Trier dredges up the past to angrily, misguidedly accuse the present of lack of foresight, Hou Hsaio-hsien, with a hush, details the ongoing tragic ironies of history (Shu Qi’s gentle uncovering of her lover’s devastating hypocrisies—that he believes in freedom yet ultimately helps pay for a concubine’s enslavement—is heartbreaking), then simply moves forward to the present, with a dramatic cut from the courtesan’s candlelit den to a speeding motorcycle scrambling across a clogged cityscape.

With “A Time for Youth,” Hou simultaneously coalesces and breaks apart the entire endeavor, both bringing the entirety of Three Times into tight focus and revealing the inherent dangers in defining an era solely through the representation of a man and a woman. This third chapter, bathed in dusky evening glow and neon blues and greens, has been most often compared to Hou’s 2001 Millennium Mambo, both favorably and not, yet like “A Time for Freedom,” the 2005-set “Youth” needs to be considered on its own terms, away from Mambo’s more ethereal trappings—for all of its meandering and nightclub posturing, Hou’s closing segment is Three Times’ most concrete and troubling. Finally, the gorgeous images of the sultry Shu Qi and the sexy Chang Chen betray us as viewers; we are persuaded by the two other shorts, and implicitly a century’s worth of iconic male-female coupling, to follow their latest incarnation, this time as a young duo explicitly sexually involved with one another, as the central love story. Yet Hou seems to be begging us to look at this so-called love story with a sidelong glance; as the full consequences of this tale, full of the requisite modern-day spiritual malaise and technological overload, become clear, we realize that indeed there has been a love story here, yet it has emerged from the peripheries, by way of an unexpected third party. And Shu Qi’s (and our) ignorance of it has tragic consequences. A surprise from Hou: the hetero norm, seen in different shades of illumination in 1966 and 1911, has finally been busted wide open. Yet despite this, Shu Qi and Chang Chen ride off together on his motorcycle, ignoring their possible incompatibility in favor of the safety of each other’s grasp, typified by the epileptic Shu Qi character’s clinging to her boyfriend’s body for dear life as they careen down the highway.

Hou’s questioning of the validity of this final couple, caught up in the everyday communication tangle of text messaging and email, and the artistic shortcuts of bar karaoke and computer music-writing programs like GarageBand, throws the entirety of Three Timesinto dazzling, retrospective illumination: How does the idea of the normatized couple, reflected idealistically only in the 1966 segment, function when so completely wedded to the environmental and political truths of which it is a product? Well, in love, history, and the stranglehold of social codes, there is no one easy answer. In this expansive and personal vision of Taiwan, history isn’t a straight line; rather it’s a constant dialogue, a search for a mutual understanding between both people and eras, from large-scale occupation to individual self-delusion. It all sounds grandiose, yet Hou never makes grander claims than his delicate balancing act can sustain; it’s embedded in the text, in history, and for once, Hou made me not just understand it but feel it.