Before we get to the film's title, before we get to one of Hou Hsiao-hsien's patented group portraits in flux around a table, we are introduced to his heroine in a dreamy slow-motion single take, with the camera tagging along behind her, unable ever to catch up, as she strides beneath the fluorescent tubes of an endless pedestrian overpass. A third-person narrator tells us the essential situation: a long-term abusive relationship with a no-account boyfriend named Hao-hao. The heroine would periodically break it off, and then, "as if under a spell, or hypnotized," she would keep coming back for more. Once we've been told the essential situation, we've been told everything we need to know. The film has a situation only; it has no story. The events, if you can call them that, are recounted in no particular order. Their repetitive nature -- the numberless break-ups and make-ups -- renders chronology irrelevant. Now and again the narrator will fill us in on what happened right before we see it happen. (Faint echoes of Robert Bresson: conventional suspense plays no part.) Nothing much could be said to go on, if life itself were thought to be nothing much: the heroine takes a job as a strip-club hostess, where she meets an easygoing gangster named Jack, an alternative to her volatile on-again-off-again boyfriend. We never do learn the fates of these characters, despite the distanced vantage point of the narrator. A lot can be told, however, without telling a story. And this is a rich, rich film: visually rich and philosophically rich. Through the lusciousness of its color, the grip of its compositions, the tenacity of its tempo, it lets us appreciate, even while the characters may not, the preciousness of life. And this, in combination with the flatline narrative, fosters a sort of nostalgia for the present, a longing to do it all over again, an awareness of its slipping away. If the principal characters, one and all, are unexceptional, unadmirable, unsympathetic -- if they are, as a Somerset Maugham might say, "scum" -- if they are deemed "worthless" -- it does not diminish the preciousness; it paradoxically heightens it. Snow White and Cinderella had no need of second chances. Qi Shu, Chun-hao Tuan, Jack Kao. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd