Three Times is better titled in Chinese – Zui haode Shiguang, or Best Moments, since one of the two characters used to write “moments”, guang, really means light: this is a felicitous word to describe Hou Xiao Xian’s camera work (long still shots in natural light).
The middle “moment” is a delightful surprise: a visually opulent, color silent film set in the floating world in Taipei in 1911, complete with lavish Qing outfits and interiors. Both it and the first “moment”, set in 1960s in Kaohsiung, are visually very beautiful.
By comparison I have found the third “moment”, set in Taipei in 2005, difficult to describe as beautiful; I couldn’t like either the colors or the costumes (or rather lack thereof); its story – the contorted love relationships of a mentally ill person – is another “modern” element to which I find it difficult to relate. I wonder what the director’s intention was: did he mean to contrast visually beautiful past with visually ugly present? If so, this would explain why the 2005 moment it is the only one of the three “moments” which betrays – in fact, dwells on – a fault in the heroine’s beauty – her dense freckles.
Or does he find the third moment equally beautiful with the first two? If so, is there something wrong with my relationship to modernity? Do I lack a device in the brain which would allow me to appreciate modernity?
(Others lack it, too: e.g. Kawabata).
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