I must be a bit slow.. since I'm really having a hard time trying to understand the movie. I mean I kinda of get the story of 1966 and 2005 not so much with the 1911..
and it feels like all 3 movies should complement one another yet.. i just can't connect the dots =/ can someone explain :D
I can appreciate the feeling you have about trying to connect the stories in some way. Because they are set so far apart I would think that the characters in the second and third eras would have been grandchildren of the characters that preceeded them. But maybe they are just isolated stories.
I thought that the first and second era stories were elegant and quietly told although, particularly in the earliest era, I honestly have no idea what, exactly, was taking place. I attribute my ignorance to a cultural gap.
As for the third part, I believe I got the gist of the story but the synopsis I read made reference to 4 characters and I only recall 3.
Making the movie enjoyable, although confusing (to me, anyway), says a lot for the filmmakers. Maybe if I read all of the posts here I can find some answers to my questions.
Emperor: Tell me how he died.
Captain Algren: I will tell you...how he lived.
1911: The woman is a high priced prostitute, and the man, a family man at that, is most likely her favorite customer--someone she loved and hoped would get her out of her situation. When she asked him to take her as a concubine, he was overwhelmed, and wrote her a letter pretty much saying goodbye to her.
I don't think three stories are supposed to be related in anyway. The characters are just played by the same actors. I think it's a great film in that it shows the changing gender expectations in China throughout the decades. Very informative for us Americans ignorant of others' cultures.
It's not set in China, all of the stories are set in Taiwan.
I think there is a way in which the stories are connected and that makes sense. Note that the three stories are not chronologically ordered, with the earliest story placed in the middle. This has been frowned upon a lot and has even been criticized, but it should only be taken as a deliberate hint that the connection is not meant to be on a time axis in whatever way, but not arbitrary either. Here is my theory:
In the first story, two people find love. It turns out to be rather effortless. Okay, the guy has to travel a bit to find the girl again but let's face it: they get together after not much conversation. Love just is. The second story is about unrequitted love, and as such the opposite of the first. This gives the clue for the connection of the third story, which is basically extending the path from good to worst. What is worse than unrequitted love? Well, finding love and not knowing what to do with it. And at this point I think the time axis does become important again, because it is easy to see the third part as the way Hou reads modern relationships.
Someone mentioned to me that in some interview he indeed says that he simply doesn't get people from today. This I guess leads him to study it in film. In a sense, the ground of the third episode he already covered in Millennium Mambo (and beautifully so, I think) but it is in the context of the other two stories that the message becomes more haunting.
This is why the last shot of the movie is more than just an arbitrary choice to break up the storyline. We see a girl litterally clinging on, not knowing what else to do. She clings on to her boyfriend on a motorcycle driving god knows where. The motorcycle, and the driving around apparently aimlessly is a familiar motive that Hou for instance also uses a lot in Goodbye South, goodbye.
Just to clarify something.
In that period, courtesans rarely provided sex to their clients. They mostly sang/danced and accompanies their customers. So I don't think she would have been referred to as a prostitute.
I don't think the stories are meant to be "connected". I think it just shows styles of love and courtship in three different eras. The comparisons were interesting to me. In the '60's, it was slow and innocent, with the couple working out the new way of courtship unrestrainted by the customs of the past, the early 1900's, where a woman of Chinese descent was considered property and needed a man of means to be kind enough to rescue her from a life of being a concubine, and the free and unrestrained '90's, where everything goes...it was interesting to see within the context of another culture. I dug it...
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