Three Times (Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2005)

 

Hou Hsiao Hsien’s haunting trilogy Three Times casts its leads Shu Qi and Chang Chen in three stories of imperfect connection, set in three different decades. The 1960’s sequence is primarily structured around a soldier’s search, during a brief leave, for May, who worked at a pool hall he formerly frequented. The 1910’s sequence somewhat reverses the dynamic, the woman now a courtesan, always there, the man an occasional customer who she sees as her primary hope of obtaining freedom, even in the absence of any promises or stated intentions on his part. The woman in the technology-heavy modern-day is the freest of the three by most measures, but her situation remains defined by challenge and dysfunction. Both the main actors are perfectly cast and deployed, with Qi especially engaging and wide-ranging: the way May beams with delight when he unexpectedly turns up in the first sequence is particularly irresistible. The film suggests that the barriers to mutual discovery are ever-present, but shifting, the three stories drawing in the country’s vulnerability to foreign powers, the machinations of wartime, the indentured courtesan system, and more recently the impact of a speeded-up, connected society. That last sequence ends with the most explicit assertion of female choice, her on the back of his motorcycle after she tells him to take her to his place: such freedom is far removed from the plight of the poor courtesan, but as presented here hardly represents a straightforward expression of female progress (in a way, May’s perpetual changing of jobs and locations in the first story suggests an existential lightness of being that the other two woman lack, even though, or indeed because, we don’t know what underlines it). The non-chronological ordering of the sequences is just one way in which Hou discourages a simpler reading of the film, even as the multiple use of the same actors, and the director’s matchless formal grace, provide a binding sense of transcendent persistence.