3 short stories where director Hou Hsiao Hsien explores the nature of love.
The first story “A time for love” deals about Chen (Chen Chang) who falls for a girl working on a pool just before enlisting on the Army; he comes back to the pool house just to find out she already quitted that job. Chen decides to find her.
The second story: “A time for freedom” happens on a 1911 China, and tells the story of a courtesan and her relationship with the owner of a plantation, while the last story entitled “A time for youth” is based on modern times and far more complicated than the other two stories: Jing (Qi Shu) is an epileptic singer, who is losing sight on her right eye, lives with her mother, grandmother and occasionally her girlfriend. But she already found someone else: Micky Zhen.
The movie is extremely visual, it doesn’t have too much dialogues and is beautifully shot. Framing and lighting are equally superb and a good example of good film language.
As I already said, “A time for youth” is the most interesting because even though modern times have more freedom, sometimes more freedom means more choices, and more choices leads to confusion.
For the 3 stories director Hsai Hsien chose the same couple giving a sense of unity.
About the movie, director Hou Hsai says: “Our lives are full of fragmentary memories. We can’t give them names, we can’t classify them and they have no great significance. But they lodge in the mind, somehow unshakeable”… “I used to love to play pool when I was young, and I have a memory fragment of the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” always playing in the pool-hall. Now I’m pushing sixty, and these things have been hanging around for so long it seems like they’re part of me… I think of them as the best of times”… “the best not because we can’t forget them, nor because thy’re things that have now been lost. The reason they’re the best is that they exist only in our memories. I have the feeling that this is not the last film I’ll make in this vein”.
