Thanks Blake for writing about my favorite narrative film made since
Bresson stopped making films. Unfortunately, "Three Times" was my
first Hou, since then I also watched "Cafe Lumiere", on DVD, and I
love that too. Hou offers a revolutionary approach to cinema, he uses
the camera, light, characters, etc. to create an experience so
different than others that his art is not cinema by my previous
definitions.

I was in love with the film throughout, despite the obvious discomfort
in the theatre during the second part, I was not capable of following
what happened as a story, being too immersed in watching the
compositions and the camera movements...

The differences between the parts is unimportant, or very important,
depending on which way you look at it. They prove that Hou simply does
not care about being consistent in terms of "narrative style", rather,
he is looking for a continuity in vision, and the differences between
the parts forces us to concentrate on that, which makes the work both
courageous and personal.

Please don't think I was only following the abstract form, though I
could not keep my eyes from wondering around the frame, or paying
close attention the the moments when the cuts happen; there is a new
sense of "realism", a word I hate but find useful at the moment, only
available in Hou's films. His vision requires a new way of looking at
acting, or creating stories, or framing events, and that inevitably
leads to a new form of reality, unheard of before, and a new form of
experiencing events.

"Cafe Lumiere" would be boring to many since it really tells nothing,
or not much, in the specific sense, but the film goes up and down
between love/hope and lovelessness/hopelessness (dividing the film to
three, in one way of looking), creating an emotional experience, very
much tied to the belief in vision, the immaterial materiality that
Fred expresses (which Brian simply doesn't get).

I cried a lot during the scene in "Cafe Lumiere" when the daughter
tells the mother she is pregnant and will keep the baby, it is about
the whole human suffering and courage, just as everything else in Hou
is about something greater than it is, thanks to his supernatural vision.

If there was no other indication of Hou's taste, there would be the
credits, that I couldn't take my eyes off watching both films, they
are masterpieces of abstract form in their own right, especially since
I can't read what it says there.

Hou's cinema simply is sublime, a word I don't like using very often.
Yoel