Three Times (Zui hao de shi guang)
Hou Hsiao-hsien's latest opus, ''Three Times," is a discreetly cosmic, majestic trilogy. The film has beautiful costumes and photography and a wonderful script from Hou's regular collaborator, Chu Tien-wen. It details the progress of three love stories, all starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen, in 1966, 1911, and 2005.
Hou uses the letter, and its electronic outgrowth, as the central prop while centering the action against a backdrop of Taiwan's modern historical development. But Hou provides the intimacy of a drawing-room drama as opposed to the epic another, more ostentatious filmmaker might try.
The 1966 chapter, called ''A Time for Love," is first and is set principally in a pool hall, where May (Shu) works and Chen (Chang) visits when he's on R&R from the service. May reads a letter he wrote to another girl and finds it sweet (the addressee read it and dutifully returned to racking balls). The two embark on a demure flirtation. He writes May a letter of her own, and one of his signature lines is ''Time flies," which, no matter where you stand on Hou's temperance, is a tickling irony. That affair becomes complicated when she ups and leaves. And in a handful of lovely sequences, Chen wanders the countryside trying to find her.
The next chapter, ''A Time for Freedom," more or less accepts the emotional baton from the previous episode, bringing Shu and Chang into more sensual proximity. Set in 1911 during Japan's occupation of Taiwan and told as a silent film with intertitles but without the format's visual mania (Hou doesn't deviate from his regal, pristine strategy), this is the strongest of the three.
In it, a married diplomat visits a brothel and captures the affection of the courtesan who pampers him. They have an intellectually engaged friendship that culminates in two aching exchanges that hinge on the upkeep of personal principles. The influence of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu on Hou (''Café Lumière," from last year, was a tribute to him) is in full bloom in this chapter. The story and its emotional depths materialize like a photographic print soaking in developing solution. The only sounds we hear are a fluttering piano score and, later, what surely is the splash of a teardrop. The girlishness Shu exudes in the two surrounding segments is on hold. For 45 minutes or so, she has a woman's wise, intelligent bearing.
In the third, least intoxicating chapter (''A Time for Youth"), Shu plays a chain-smoking bisexual epileptic Taipei singer who could be an extension of the wastrel she played in Hou's ''Millennium Mambo." It's the middle chapter in ''Three Times" that proves Shu's unforgettably gorgeous face belongs to a serious actress.
Hou's delicacy and understatement probably keep him from Wong Kar-wai's level of obsessive fandom. But his restraint tends to make Wong's opulence seem fatuous by comparison (even though it absolutely is not). In all, ''Three Times" is another triumph of modesty from a master who deserves real, paying audiences, not just the adoration of besotted film critics.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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