on three times, by hou hsiao-hsien

In Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2005 Taiwanese film Three Times, two people fall in love – once in 1966, another time in 1911, and then in 2005. Each Time sees these two people clothed in their era’s habits. Each Time is a politically fraught, narratively dense moment for Taiwan. First, a courtesan’s gilded chambers, tea kettle steam catching the sunlight, the keening of a traditional singer replacing dialogue. Then, the quiet dance of courtship a soldier performs at every pool table from Taipei to Huwei, searching for a girl who leaned into his glances and made him late for his train back to the army base. Finally, the unsettling urban dankness of a technological Taiwan, breathless in its effort to keep up with a troubled singer and her photographer boyfriend. Each world uses the same two actors, falling in love three separate times. Each world captures and displays a singular aspect of human intimacy – loneliness, and our anxious attempts to escape it. The structure is so formally potent, that Barry Jenkins used this tripartite metaverse as inspiration for Moonlight.

We see the courtesan waiting loyally for her most friendly visitor, the soldier holding hands with his girl in an electric first touch, and the dark-haired underground singer squeezing her lovers dry of their obsession and passion for her. All are evading the clammy hands of solitude with varying success. That first touch between the soldier and the pool-playing girl in 1966 Huwei is all innocence, untainted by ulterior motive or desire. It plays like a fairytale, with a longed-for mutuality climaxing in soft, childlike movements in the rain. Although this universe with the soldier and his lover is termed A Time For Love, it is just as much a time for illusion, a time for unpracticed hands, darting eyes, careful touches, and adolescent imagination. In A Time for Freedom, set in 1911, the courtesan’s longed-for love-touch never comes, and her freedom fighting visitor expounds on the virtues of poetry and politics, rather than meet her halfway – he never gives her the love that could so easily set her free. Despite this, she waits on his letters, dresses him for arrival and departure, and falls headlong into his unamenable arms. There is heady irony in this title, A Time For Freedom – the courtesan has a restrained, cloistered loyalty for (and concomitant loneliness because of) a man she can never have.

And then comes the befuddling, numbing pain of post-modern Taipei, where the New Age of 2005 and its chunky grey gadgets have fully possessed those of flighty and fickle nature. Attention lasts a few seconds, a drug high lasts a little longer. It is A Time For Youth, but these youths live in dreary agony, engaging with the illicit – relationships, substances – just as often as they grope for emotional intimacy. They meet with their bodies before they meet minds. Sex and attention are somehow conflated; they go through the motions of a banal love routine like revivified zombies, either too afraid to commit to someone, or all too eager to explode with half-formed yet devastating expressions of loneliness. Creating art goes some way towards mollifying that loneliness - so, the couple make songs, pictures, films. Otherwise, they are caught in an endless mechanical dance, swinging in pendulous, chaotic fear from one lover to another. A Time For Youth is colored by such unhappy, peripatetic movements to and from other people. Yet, director Hou Hsiao-Hsien reminds us that there is redemption in even this very human movement, this ungoverned, unschooled fumbling for intimacy. It appears that there is always someone with us, for us. Despite the loneliness and fear, there are always one or two souls, walking beside us, to keep us company from that ever-pulsating roar of the passage of time.