The first segment, titled A Time for Love, is set in 1966. We are in a billiard hall in Kaohsiung. Chang Chen plays Chen, a conscript on leave. Shu Qi plays May, a young woman who works at the pool hall.
The second segment is a radical departure. We jump back in time to 1911, during the final years of the Qing Dynasty. Taiwan is under Japanese colonial rule. Chang Chen plays a revolutionary poet. Shu Qi plays a courtesan-artist, a geisha-like figure.
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.
By the end of the segment, Chen has returned to the army. May sends him a letter that arrives too late. The final shot is a long take of a bus driving away down a dirt road. We do not see faces. We see only dust.
Key takeaway: In this first "time," Hou shows us that love in the 1960s was a whispered secret—visible only in sideways glances and the lonely sound of a train passing at night. three times hou hsiao hsien
The plot is deceptively simple: Zhang meets Jing. They sleep together. She leaves. He meets a girl who looks exactly like her. Is it the same person? Is he remembering a past life? Or is he simply a man who has seen too many movies?
Hou refuses to answer. Instead, he gives us the film’s most devastating sequence: Zhang riding his motorcycle through a rainstorm, screaming Jing’s name at a convenience store where she once worked. The camera shakes. The rain is real. The performance—Chang Chen’s sobs—is unbearable.
This is the "time for youth," but youth, Hou argues, is not freedom. Youth is the age of addiction—to phones, to drugs (Jing is a pill-popper), to the fantasy of romance. The lovers in this segment are the most physically intimate (they actually have sex on screen), yet they are the loneliest.
Key takeaway: In this final "time," Hou warns us that when love loses all barriers, it also loses all meaning. The noise of modernity drowns out the whisper of genuine connection. The first segment, titled A Time for Love , is set in 1966
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.
Three Times stands as his most accessible film, his most romantic film, and perhaps his most personal. In it, you see all three of Hou’s personas:
If you have never seen a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, start with Three Times. Watch it once for the images. Watch it twice for the silence. Watch it three times—three times—to understand that time is not a river. It is a room. And we are all waiting for someone to walk through the door.
Here, Hou does something breathtaking. The entire 40-minute segment is shot without synchronous sound. We hear a piano score, intertitles (like a silent film), and ambient noise—but never the actors’ voices. All dialogue appears as title cards. The plot is deceptively simple: Zhang meets Jing
Why? Because Hou Hsiao-hsien is showing us the silence of the oppressed. 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 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.
For the first time in the film, Hou uses handheld cameras, rapid cuts, and jump cuts. The world is neon-lit, chaotic, full of cell phones and motorcycles. There is no silence here—only the hum of karaoke bars, traffic, and electronic music.
Why the shift? Because Hou Hsiao-hsien is diagnosing modern love. In the 1960s, love was delayed. In 1911, love was forbidden. But in 2005, love is lost. We have every technology to connect, yet we cannot touch each other’s souls.