The opening segment is widely regarded as the film’s masterpiece. Set in 1966 in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, "A Time for Love" captures the fleeting innocence of youth with crystalline beauty.
The story follows a young soldier, Chen (Chang Chen), who meets a young woman, May (Shu Qi), at a billiard hall. A connection is sparked, but Chen is drafted into the military. The narrative follows his attempts to find May again through a series of billiard halls, writing her letters as he searches.
Hou’s direction here is masterful. The camera lingers on the click of billiard balls, the drift of cigarette smoke, and the play of light through windows. There is almost no plot in the traditional sense; the drama lies entirely in the anticipation and the longing. The segment concludes with a famous static shot of the two characters gazing at each other, silent and unmoving. It is a cinematic definition of "a moment suspended in time," capturing the purity of a love that exists in the waiting rather than the possession. three times hou hsiao hsien
To watch one Hou Hsiao-hsien film is to adjust your pace. To watch three is to relearn how to see. Hou does not make movies that rush to meet you; he builds worlds that you must walk into, slowly, often from a great distance. For this review, we consider three pillars: A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985), The Flowers of War (a common misnomer—correcting to The Flowers of War is actually Zhang Yimou; Hou’s true historical masterpiece is A City of Sadness (1989)), and The Assassin (2015).
Let us correct that to a proper triptych: A Time to Live, a Time to Die (youth/memory), The Puppetmaster (1993) (history/theatre), and The Assassin (2015) (nature/martial arts). The opening segment is widely regarded as the
Hou’s late-career masterpiece. Set in 9th-century Tang dynasty, it follows a female assassin (Shu Qi) ordered to kill her cousin, a political lord she once loved.
If you ask a cinephile to name the single most defining characteristic of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s work, they will likely give you one answer: stillness. But in his 2005 masterpiece, Three Times (最好的時光), Hou redefined that stillness. He turned it into a kaleidoscope. The film is a triptych—three separate love stories set in three distinct eras of 20th-century Taiwan, each starring the same two actors (Shu Qi and Chang Chen) playing different lovers. A connection is sparked, but Chen is drafted
But to watch Three Times is not merely to watch three short films. It is to experience three times Hou Hsiao-hsien 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.
Below, we break down the film’s three segments not just as narratives, but as distinct cinematic languages. Each part represents a different "time" in Hou’s own artistic evolution.