Barcelona Dispatch. 1.

For its opening day, the Barcelona Asian Film Festival made an offer not to be refused. Three Times is a kind of distillation of Hou Hsiao-hsien's career. Three stories in three different historical periods, all of them previously visited by the director, dealing with romance and the way politics affect personal lives - and three stories told in an almost comatose rhythm, as Hou likes to tell stories, grasping invisibleness and the importance of apparently empty moments in a melancholic style. This is Hou at his best, revising himself with rigor and giving us the best possible version of his art. This is a powerful defense of essentialism in a time of horror vacui.

The three stories of Three Times share Chang Chen and Shu Qi, who's never been a better actress than here - providing all of her characters a strong sense of vividness, a detailed humanity. The first story, "A Time of Love," set in Taiwan in 1966, follows the romance between a pool-hall hostess and an army conscript who has an unexpected crush on her. Chen was looking for the previous hostess, whom he'd met on a previous leave, but instead finds May and, naturally, is captivated. Set to two main musical leitmotivs - The Platters' "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and Aphrodite's Child "Rain and Tears" - this is a celebration of that teenage feeling of love, so vividly recreated that screen literally pours rain, and tears, and crush.

Naïve passion turns to frustration in "A Time for Freedom," set in Taiwan in 1911, where Hou almost seems to remake one of his most celebrated masterpieces, the slowcore Flowers of Shanghai. The pace is equally slow, even slower than a Codeine or Red House Painters death ballad, while the main issues are identical - the selling of sex, the prison of fate, impossible love. Shu Qi portrays a courtesan whose only possible escape from the brothel, the wealthy patron incarnated by Chan Cheng, doesn't seem to be aware of her desperation. The initially intrusive use of silent movie subtitles becomes another successful stylistic flourish, emphasizing the artifice of intercourses in a society that hides every passion and truth beneath luxurious costumes and furniture.

Finally, "A Time for Youth," set in Taipei in 2005, looks like a short version of the marvellous Millennium Mambo, that perfect depiction of the motorcycle emptiness of young modern life. A photographer and an epileptic singer are involved in a relationship which hurts both his girlfriend and her best friend. Mobiles, R&B hit singles, motorbikes, GarageBand software, everything fills the space, fills the air, but won't cure the damage in an urban landscape where emotional dependence is usually confounded with true love. This could've been written by Haruki Murakami, but it couldn't have been filmed by anyone else - not many have the strength or the intelligence to fully translate boredom into images, all open areas, without easy morals, without putting here and there any distracting elements. Too much truth will kill you.

Posted by dwhudson at April 30, 2006 4:05 AM