Cannes: Day Ten

As the festival nears its end, Time Out reviews Hou Hsiao-Hsien's excellent new film, 'Three Times'.

May 20 2005

As Cannes meanders through its final few days before the Palmes are awarded, film fatigue usually sets in; all that sitting in the dark can't be healthy, and any discussion as to the likely winners has long ago settled on a few titles.

For the record, at time of writing my pals and I reckon Michael Haneke's 'Hidden' is perhaps the strongest contender, though Jarmusch's 'Broken Flowers' and the Dardennes' 'The Child' are also in with a good shot, despite the Belgian brothers having already won the Palme d'Or with 'Rosetta'.

By the very last day of press screenings, everyone just wants to wrap the thing up, pack and go home to wait for the announcements of the prizes, so it's always a real bonus when one of the last films screened in competition turns out to be a corker. And if it's also a surprise corker, so much the better.

Thus it was with Tommy Lee Jones's directorial debut, 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada', a contemporary western-of-sorts written by Guillermo Arriaga, the Mexican novelist famous for 'Amores Perros' and '21 Grams'.

Though 'Three Burials' boasts a few flashbacks in its earlier scenes, the film has none of the jigsaw narrative complexity of 'Amores Perros' or its successor, but that's not to its detriment; the film has an epic sweep and the sturdy, adult muscularity of a good '70s movie.

Indeed, there are even echoes of Peckinpah's 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' as Jones' rancher decides to make it his mission to find the killer of his young Mexican employee and friend, and ends up making a journey by horse from Texas into Mexico with a corpse for company.

The movie's stark portrait of life among the desert rats of southern Texas has an aura of authenticity, and a welcome wry gallows humour prevents the dark thrust of the narrative from seeming overly portentous or allegorical.

Against all odds, in fact, it slowly but surely transforms itself into a tale of friendship, loyalty and the aquisition of self-knowledge – not, admittedly, the bleak picture Peckinpah would have given us, but certainly a properly mature American movie, something all too rare these days even in the Cannes competition.

Less surprising but by no means less rewarding was Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 'Three Times', a triptych movie which is arguably the Taiwanese director's finest film for some years.

Moreover, it can be seen as something of a summation of his career to date, in that the first of the three stories, set in 1966, recalls early films like 'A Time to Live, A Time to Die', the second, set in 1911, echoes 'Flowers of Shanghai', and the last, set in today's Taipei, is in the style of 'Millennium Mambo'.

The same actors appear in each episode ('A Time of Love', 'A Time of Freedom' and 'A Time of Youth'), and music features as commentary and atmospheric accompaniment in each; in the second, which plays like a silent film with intertitles, two classic Chinese songs bookend a lovely piano score somewhere between 20th-century impressionism and Jarrett-style jazz.

That may give a clue to the film's remarkable ambitions, its erudition, and its air of melancholy: in charting the way people communicate with one another, the film certainly appears to be suggesting that things are not improving, with the couple in the final episode reduced to spasmodic sex and text-messaging.

It's a movie of subtle brilliance, always stunning to look at but refusing to divulge its treasures to the inattentive viewer. It may well pick up a major prize; it certainly deserves to.

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