A few hastily-scribbled notes (to J-Lu, on e-mail) on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times, which I saw perhaps two years ago, and little of which I remember. The film could be seen as a kind of career retrospective, that is, the three segments clearly refer to Hou’s own cinematic arcs, in terms of style. An exercise, perhaps, in seeing whether he could film three phases of his career in miniature: A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Flowers of Shanghai, and Millennium Mambo. (Like any good band, Hou has three distinct periods, and here he charts three moments in a century of Taiwan history.)
The first part, set in the mid-’60s, was oddly straightforward (I didn’t expect anything so narratively pat, if a little less linear) but also just gorgeous, the second I’d quite frankly seen before in Flowers of Shanghai, right down to Lee Ping-Bin’s cinematography (though radically changed here by the fact that intertitles are substituted for dialogue), and the third… well, Shu Qi is a babe and a half (and a quick Google Image search for “Hsu Chi” will result in all of her NSFW softcore pics prior to becoming Hou’s cinematic muse), but even her presence can’t carry the aimlessness of the segment. But lesser Hou is better than most anything out there; the first segment alone, featuring the most rapturously beautiful shots of beautiful people playing pool, is well worth watching.
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