Three Times Hou Hsiao Hsien

Critics have called this segment Hou’s homage to Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. But it is more than homage. It is a meditation on how colonialism suppresses not just speech, but love itself. The couple’s dream of “freedom” is not political independence—it is the freedom to sit in the same room without fear.

Why? Because . The couple cannot speak freely—he is a wanted revolutionary, she is trapped in a brothel. Their love is conducted in whispers, letters, and stolen moments. By removing spoken dialogue, Hou forces us to read their bodies. A hand touching a sleeve. A glance held one second too long. A sigh. The Politics of the Gaze This is also the most visually experimental of the three segments. Hou employs extremely long takes (some over five minutes) where the camera barely moves. In one stunning sequence, the poet visits the courtesan’s room. They sit across from each other. He reads a letter. She pours tea. Nothing happens. And yet, everything happens. three times hou hsiao hsien

But to watch Three Times is not merely to watch three short films. It is to experience at three different peaks of his directorial power. It is a film about the impossibility of perfect timing, the weight of history, and the quiet ache of what remains unsaid. Critics have called this segment Hou’s homage to

That melody is the ghost that connects all three stories. It is the sound of —an island that has been colonized, militarized, modernized, and forgotten. The melody says: We were once here. We touched. We left. The couple’s dream of “freedom” is not political

We are all trapped in the wrong time. And that, Hou proposes, is the only universal truth about love. Searching for Three Times —or writing about it—is not just an act of film criticism. It is an act of mourning. Because Hou Hsiao-hsien, now in his late 70s, has not made a film since The Assassin (2015). There are rumors of dementia, of retirement, of a lost script called The Daughter of the Nile .

This is : he understands that young love is defined not by what is said, but by the waiting . The boy waits for a letter. The girl waits for a visit. The audience waits for a kiss that never quite arrives. The Pool Hall as a Stage Why a pool hall? Because in Hou’s Taiwan of the 1960s, young people were in transition—between Japanese colonialism and martial law, between tradition and modernity. The billiard table becomes a metaphor: balls click, pockets swallow, but the game resets. The lovers circle each other like players, afraid to make the final shot.