June 02, 2006
three times
The majority of the promo images for Hou Hsiao-Hsien's latest film are drawn from the third time, the most contemporary passage in this temporal triptych (and why not, as it's the sexiest, with suicide threats, dark clubs, text messaging, hot epileptic chicks, and the cool blue abysses of hypermodernity?)
The majority of reviews prefer the second time, the most antique among the three, shot as a silent with intertitles and set in 1911 (at the revolutionary end of the Qing dynasty, though this like most cinematic revolutions these days is discreetly left offscreen in the space of studiedly understated allusion).
It's the first time, set in 1966 as the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution was beginning on the mainland, that's the most involving (like the others, it's a narrative of heteromance deferred; unlike them, it's neither overly contrived nor overly pointed).
From the perspective of the eye, a Hou film is never dull: like Godard, he seemingly can't frame a bad shot, and even the slightest films and passages have a singular way-of-looking. He's a director of aspect, and activity can come to feel like a sort of imposition.
This becomes a problem at the level of plot. With the partial exception of the Wong Kar-Wai Lite (or Heavy, really) Millennium Mambo (which shares with the "third time" herein an impassively scolding kids-these-days overcurrent), Hou develops narrative from within ways of looking, rather than finding ways to look at the doings (contra Adorno, in Hou and elsewhere, content is sendimented form). It's the form of cinema that justifies the term world-view, a term so often reduced to indicating someone who has a theory, or even just an opinion. But if action is to arise from the viewing of a world (or a corner of the world), this mandates not only slow films, but a slow development from one to the next. While one can conjure or buy a new plot in fairly short order, it would be unjust to expect even Hou to develop self-propelling world-views, ways of looking, in rapid-fire succession.
And so fails Three Times, even though it's almost unfailingly a pleasure to look at. It has about one way of looking, which is realized on the order of events by only one of the three times; the other two are attractive, lugubrious failures.
Finally, one can't avoid wondering about the success — whether Hou's aspect here is somehow more indexed to 1966 than it is to 2005 or 1911. If, as art historians have eloquently argued, historical moments have their own ways of looking, are these ways reconstitutable? Might one conceive of a film as documentary, not of how-people-lived but of a historically-charged way of looking?
Posted by jane at June 2, 2006 07:55 AM | TrackBack