By Armond White

Three Times

Directed by Hou Hsiao Hsien

The overrated Hou Hsiao Hsien lets art snobs think they’re appreciating something rarefied when, actually, he rehashes B-movie stories but attenuates them to the point that some viewers (like tortured prisoners) begin to embrace his enervating technique as revelation. 

In Three Times, Hou tells the same love story through different periods—1966 (with pop music), 1911 (as silent film), 2005 (perverse and calamitous). The lead actors Shu Qi and Chang Chen are sexy chameleons, but Hou’s formalistic conceit cramps them. The remote camera positions force us to remember how 2046 did this more elegantly. The gnomic dialogue makes us long for that old theatrical warhorse The Four-Poster or the tripartite exposition of Joe vs. the Volcano.

Hou’s artsy antics become cynical and dishonest in the third segment, proposing a bisexual triangle as the essence of modern angst. He ignores that humans love the same through all ages, and that sexual candor is not a 2005 freedom: ’60s and teen cinema were also, for their time, sexually explicit. This is hipster pandering. Once is enough.