TIME PASSES

REVIEWED - THREE TIMES/ZUIHAODE SHIGUANG: 'OUR lives are full of fragmentary memories," Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsein wrote in his programme note for Three Times when it screened at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, writes Michael Dwyer

"We can't give them names, we can't classify them, and they have no great significance."

This is an apt summation of what Hou has achieved in the film, a triptych of slender, melancholy love stories originally planned as a project for three different directors before he took to the helm for all three. The same actors, Chang Chen and Sju Qi, play the principal roles in each of them.

Hou's most personal segment is the first, subtitled A Time for Love and set in 1966 for a brief encounter between a young woman working in a pool hall and a young man about to begin military service. The second, A Time for Freedom, takes place in 1911, when a Chinese republican, campaigning for Taiwan's freedom from Japan, becomes involved with a courtesan. The final story, A Time for Youth, moves to present-day Taipei as a photographer falls for a bisexual singer who is epileptic and losing sight in her right eye.

The most poignant and affecting sequence comes in the middle. In keeping with its early 20th-century setting, Hou assembles it in the style of a silent movie with inter-titles for the dialogue, although we hear the courtesan when she sings. The weakest segment is the over-extended opening story, in which much of what happens is inconsequential. It is further undermined by the repetitive use of The Platters singing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and the dreary Eurovision-esque Rain and Tears performed by Demis Roussos when he was a member of Aphrodite's Child.

All three vignettes are strikingly lit in precise visuals compositions, and the two lead actors impressively catch the disparate personalities they play. However, the film proves as fragmentary as Hou advised, and it is altogether less substantial and emotionally involving than his finest film, the riveting, politically charged 1989 drama, A City of Sadness.