Three Times (Hou Hsiao Hsien)

East Asian Film Series presents Three Times, a story of a timeless couple in love they take on different identities through three separate time periods.

Three Times (Hou Hsiao Hsien, Taiwan, 2005, 135 min.)

Three Times follows a timeless couple in love as, enacted by the same performers, they take on different identities through three separate time periods.  In “A Time for Love,” Chen (Chang Chen) meets May (Shu Qi) at his favorite pool hall. It is 1966, and their fleeting, dreamy romance is not defined as much by words as by the smoky atmosphere and the radio hits of the time. Then, the film flows smoothly into “A Time for Freedom,” a solemn drama of a concubine and her master in 1911. The man is obsessed with his nation’s freedom yet incapable of giving freedom or emotional security to his beloved. The third segment, “A Time for Youth,” shifts from an era of stately quiet to chaotic, contemporary Taipei. Jing, an epileptic singer, lives through the emotional chaos of her youth, sharing her love with a woman and a man. Weaving contrasting cinematic syntaxes and poignant fragments of time into a highly evocative narrative, Hou plays with the idea of reincarnation—the characters bear not only a consistent physical appearance but also the memories of other lives.  In Mandarin with English subtitles.