Three Times

1966 is a charming, exquisitely-realized romance. On brief days of leave from military service, Chang insouciantly woos Shu over a game of pool, and then pursues her in small-town pool halls across Taiwan. 1911 is silent, with inter-titles for formalized dialogue. Chang is a wealthy young reformer meeting Shu as a courtesan in her room in a large Japanese house, between excursions with the great scholar and politician Liang Qichao. In 2005, Shu has a jilted girlfriend as well as photographer Chang, and sings in dark underground clubs in Taipei. Shu is damaged physically and emotionally, and self-consciously alienated from meaning in her life.

Three Times is unmistakably Hou, with long static takes and minimal dialogue. It is beautifully shot with framed compositions which return like motifs through each section, and he makes the most of his photogenic actors.

In 1911, Chang writes to Shu to tell her he is leaving for Shanghai and he may never return, his reforming ideals falling before the courtesan who he is unwilling to save. In that moment, Three Times becomes national allegory, and Shu Qi is Taiwan herself, abandoned by China and its hypocrisies. Hou is writing her history as a continuous narrative across the Japanese colonial period, the KMT era and the present. As an allegory, Three Times becomes Hou’s personal and critical view of Taiwan. After being left to her fate, she returns steeped in nostalgia in the 1960s with freshness, charm, and captivating beauty. But by 2005, she is fractured, cynical, materialistic, and tragically lost in her modernity.

Three Times’ elegiac presentation of the 1960s, when Taiwan was an authoritarian state under martial law, makes it very particular critique and sure to irk those who would write that period differently. But as Taiwan struggles through its current crisis of confidence, Hou’s film is a timely and harsh commentary, and its wholly ambiguous and uneasy ending suits the moment.