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People are voting emotionally.

Excellent but underrated film

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Not known for big emotional payoffs, this internationally-acclaimed, but audience polarizing filmmaker, better known for modulation than sensation, in "A Time for Love", the first of three stories from "Zui hao de shi guang", atypically gives the people what they want: a reason to cry, and an occasion to nod in recognition. This cerebral, often clinical Taiwanese director, has made the unthinkable...a crowd-pleaser; it's the closest he'll ever get to mainstream filmmaker. "A Time for Love" contains a scene every bit as iconic as the moment Lloyd Dobler(John Cusack) holds his boom-box towards Diana Court's window, as Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" dovetails with the night air like a prayer, in Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything". The genesis of the momentous instant when two hands, isolated from their star-crossed owners, find each other and clasp together like nervous magnets, begins in earnest, in a billiards room, where the same man and woman will meet three times across different generations. This is the second time; the year is 1966. At a train station, a man and woman share an umbrella; they're too late to catch a train, but right on time for love. It's raining.In "Lexus and Butters", an episode of Season 6 of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park", Cartman and the gang visit the local Hooters where Butters falls under the spell of a Hooters waitress. Failing to understand that Lexus entertains men for a living, he pursuses her, confusing the girl's professional flirting with love. Butter's plight is Chen's plight as well, in "Zui hao de shi guang", a soldier, who writes a letter to the pool girl, describing his time with her as a happy experience. In the scene, we see the aftermath of his mistake; we see the slight curl in the girl's lip before she folds the letter away. The girl leaves. May(Qi Shu) is her replacement. During a long, drawn-out scene, Chen(Chen Chang) and the pool girl shoot a game, in which the long take allows the viewer to see how chemistry works, how mutual ground can unfold into elevation. They're largely silent, but it's a comfortable silence, interjected with Chen's apprehensive incursions about this sinuous girl holding a stick. It looks like a date, but the spontaneity of actualization is dashed by a feminine arm that appears suddenly in frame under Chen, cigarette in mouth, lining up his shot, to lay down an ashtray. It's May's job to smile. He pays her. But in an earlier scene, May found the letter he wrote to the other pool girl, setting up the possibility that she takes pleasure in entertaining the soldier. She's no Lexus; he's no Butters.Like the late Johnny Cash, Chen has "been everywhere" too, man; instead of "Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Toronto...," Chen has been to Gangshen, Jiayi, Shuishang, Xinying...," looking for May. The town names may be Chinese, but the music in "A Time for Love" is conspicuously American, when it matters. The filmmaker uses The Platters' "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and Aphrodite Child's "Rain and Tears" to convey romance, seemingly, in a way that western audiences can understand. When Cheng finds May in a Huwei pool hall, the girl reacts with such obvious delight, the audience can now differentiate May's professional smile from her genuine one. Unusual for this filmmaker, the following scene at a noodle cafe, is brief, succinct, and to-the-point: May looks at Cheng, waiting for the soldier to make the next move. The two American songs have the effect of explaining the American length of the scene, even though it carries the filmmaker's trademark of a fixed camera and no dialogue. And that next move; it's not an overture for intimacy, or even a kiss, it's the simple desire to hold a girl's hand. While "A Time for Freedom"(for people who liked "Hai Shang Hua") and "A Time for Youth(for people who could tolerate "Qian xi man po") have its strong points, "A Time for Love" is an unqualified success.

The first part is very nice - the more I think about it, the more I like it. The eye contacts and body language of Shu Qi and Zhang Zhen (esp. Shu Qi's eagerness, her excitement, curiosity,etc.), their silliness, not knowing what to do/say - all impress me. Not quite because of the acting, but the description of the innocence per se. It is a very genuine description of something that I am not sure if it still exists anymore nowadays. It is also delightful to hear the song Rain And Tears in the movie(The song mentioned in Zhang Zhen's letter to Shu Qi). Part Two would be good if it was not a silent movie. I don't see any GOOD reason for that. Part Three - the only reason I can think of for adding this part in the movie is to suggest that all the good can only be found in the past. Otherwise, not only does the third part do no good to the film, it tremendously ruins it.

It's so amusing to read the adoring, slavishly reverent attitudes of viewers who, I can only surmise, can not bring themselves to poo-poo an art film that so many critics have championed. This film is a disaster. There is no narrative to speak of in any of the three stories. The characters act as if embalmed. Scenes unfold at a glacial pace and sequences are repeated ad nauseam, e.g., the pool playing in the first story. The second segment should be laughed off the screen. How pretentious to watch the characters lips moving and then be shown in titles what they just said. This is film-making at the college sophomore level. And the third part is just one giant cliché about alienated youth. Just imagine!!! They have sex, they sing about being different, and they look at the Internet and find kinky Web sites. Shocking!! Don't believe the hype on this one. There is NOTHING there.

This was my first Hou Hsiao-hsien picture, and I feel like I've been missing out on quite a lot, seeing as he's been doing this for about a quarter century. Not that I'm experiencing the kind of panic and regret that I might if I'd only just discovered Godard or Jarmusch. Three Times is simply the kind of movie I gravitate to, and I'm hoping it points the way to a trove of similar pleasures, even if it isn't quite a masterpiece on its own.As I'm sure others around here have written, Three Times is literally about three different times, as in eras: 1911, 1966, and 2005, and each of the forty-minute featurettes in this triptych is defined by a separate thematic quality: the 1960s, naturally, by love; the end of Dynastic rule by freedom; and contemporary China by youth. All of them, however, involve love on some level, or, at the very least, sex. Each chapter centers on a man and a woman (played by Chang Chen and Shu Qi in each case) caught up in some variation of romantic or erotic involvement that reflects the three themes.What I love about Hou's approach is that each of these forty-minute pieces tells no more "story" than an average Hollywood film would chew up and spit out in its first four or five minutes. In "A Time for Love" (the 1960s chapter) little more "happens" than a young soldier returning from military leave to find that the girl he's been writing to has moved to another town, so he tracks her down and they spend a few hours together. The other stories cover similarly scant territory while Hou allows his camera and the nearly constant presence of popular music to evoke the tempo and space of his characters' lives. Hou and his writer Chu T'ien-wen find worlds of behavior to explore and time worth spending in scenes that most writers would consider the merely necessary business of establishing a premise and getting their characters into position.If the movie doesn't exactly reach ecstatic heights, it isn't for lack of Hou's ability to fulfill his own purpose, but merely because his purpose contains almost no emotional arc, either for his characters or for his audience, and it isn't loaded up with the kind of ornate, spiritual metaphor that similarly deliberate films by, say, Bergman and Tarkovsky are. Hou doesn't seem interested (at least here) in either God or people, per se, but rather our cognitive relationship to the passage of time and the subtle but profound effect of small decisions on the course of our own histories.