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July 13, 2006

Three Times

One for the Ages

By Tram

Author's Note: I was personally ecstatic when Anthony Kaufman reported in his blog that Hou Hsiao-hsien's latest, Three Times, made $10,000 at Chicago's Music Box — one of the biggest openings of the year for that theatrical venue. As Kaufman astutely pointed out, all the major Chicago-based critics went ape-shit crazy for Three Times: Jonathan Rosenbaum (Reader), Roger Ebert (Sun-Times), and Michael Wilmington (Tribune). Such news is always welcoming, but perhaps it is even more so, in light of honcho Harvey Weinstein's recent acquisition of Wellspring. Anyway, while I concede that I have nowhere near as much talent or leverage as the aforementioned critics to convert a lot of people to seeing Three Times, I would be delighted as hell if the following paragraphs help convince one or even two folks into seeing this masterpiece.

In the opening chapter ("A Time for Love") of Hou's time-traveling triptych, we are transported to 1966, Kaohsiung. The Platters' slow, romantic number, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," is playing overtime in a pool house jukebox - it is only inevitable that upon a game of pool, the hostess and the young soldier, soon to depart on draft, fall in love. But like one of those romantic pop tunes, its duration is fleeting: the music ends, and the soldier goes his way, and the hostess hers. Hou intercuts the almost static images of the pool hall with shots of speeding bikes, boats, and trains. For Hou, human memories simply cannot keep up with the pace of modernity. Nevertheless, the soldier, resolute to find her, attemps to keep her within time's grasp. To the melancholic tune of Aphrodite's Child's "Rain and Tears", the young man ventures cross-country, on a modest bike, no less, in search of the hostess he left behind.

For the middle chapter, "A Time for Freedom", we retrogress to 1911, Dadaocheng, where an activist diplomat forms an emotional attachment to a concubine, amidst the tightly enclosed setting of a brothel. The concubine pleas to the diplomat that he save her from her oppressed conditions. But alas, the activist denies such a plea - he is not "masculine" enough. How can he set her free from the shackles of oppression when he is still oppressed, himself? His motherland, Taiwan, is currently occupied by Japan's military. The segment ends on an incomplete note, as the diplomat and the concubine find themselves rendered helpless in a patriarchal society.

But if "A Time for Freedom" feels too downbeat, consider it to be more romantic than the final, enclosing chapter, "A Time for Youth", in which Hou flashforwards to modern Taipei, 2005. An epileptic singer is embroiled in a messy love triangle. She falls in love with a male photographer — much to the suspicion and dismay of a female live-in lover named Micky. The irony is that our heroine here — more sexually liberated than her predecessors in the previous chapters (in 1911, our heroine is a concubine; in 1966, a hostess, and in 2005, a pop singer — all are entertainers, who receive more autonomy within each progressing period) — does not feel truly free. Maybe too much of a good thing is a bad thing. The singer seems aimless (she even tries to sell her soul on the Internet, for godsake!) Whereas the concubine and hostess are restricted in their personal and professional choices, the singer does not really know what she wants, let alone what road to take.

Hou deftly binds the exterior sights and sounds of Taipei to the singer's confused interior self. Even in Hou's slow, long takes, we are still able to sense the confusion — and frustration — that arises from a life governed by speed and impulses. When the singer does not return her female lover's cell phone calls immediately (she text messages, instead — a decision that can be construed as both impersonal and slow), the lover is saddened and jealous.

Gilles Deleuze once observed that memory divulged more about the present than the past. Deleuze's abstract concept could not have been better actualized than here onscreen in Three Times. Hou's self-reflexive nature is most evident in the silent film aesthetics in "A Time for Freedom" (intertitle cards and instrumental piano music) and the recurrence of actors (Shu Qi and Chang Chen play the lovers in all three stories) and pop tunes and communication devices (letters, poetry, and e-mail and cell phones) throughout the periods — he basically reaffirms his position as a present-day individual trying to make sense of the intertwining struggles of love, freedom, and youth in the contemporary era, and trying to link it to the past.
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Mis-en-scene plays a crucial role in the binding of the past and the present. The mis-en-scene of "A Time for Youth" — a segment derided by a fine share of folks as the "worse" — is intentionally atmospheric and lonesome. Catchy electronic lights scatter urban streets (i.e. motorcycle, car lights, neon signs), indoors (nightclubs, bedrooms with laptops and cellphones) in darkness. Capitalism does not seem as promising as it once did. Compare the alienated youths in 2005 segment to the optimistic, pair of lovers in 1966 of "A Time for Love", and what you have here is sociologically-charged emotions projecting itself onto the screen. The Taiwan of 1966 had broken free from Japanese occupation (as depicted in "A Time for Freedom") and the communist Chinese regime, and has since evolved into its own new, individual identity - with a dynamic capitalist economy, to boot. The hope and optimism, sprung from such a time, is perfectly realized in romantic landscapes (falling in love amidst a game of pool; the departed lover traveling the waters on steam-powered rafts; a lovers' reunion in the rain).

In a bold (one that would be deemed unsatisfying to most) but thought-provoking move, Hou chooses to close "A Time for Youth" — and Three Times — with a shot eerily similar to the shot that opened the third segment: the singer holding onto her male lover's waist, whilst speeding on his motorcycle. We don't know much more about the characters now as we did in the beginning. Since history IS actually about the present, our present remains even more open-ended than the ever-revisionist past.

Considering that Hou is at his most self-reflexive here in Three Times - ruminating not only upon the past and the present but examining cinema's own relationship to the past and present, it is probably the highest compliment that I can pay to say that Three Times is Baudry-esque in its transcendental use of mirroring time and space. The wonderful Reverse Shot critic Elbert Ventura pretty much articulated my emotions best when he wrote about the spacial limitations and the permeable portal of time the film paradoxically evokes:

In "A Time for Freedom," Chang's writer reads a poem: "Although this place has torn my heart asunder, it is wrenching to leave it." It's an epigram that sums up Hou's project, finding sorrow in the limits of human experience, but solace in its timelessness.

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