Not top-rung Hou Hsiao-hsien. In fact bottom-rung Hou Hsiao-hsien, with surprisingly lackluster color from his trusty cameraman, Mark Lee Ping-bin. The idea of pairing up the same actor and actress (Chang Chen and Shu Qi, both excellent) in three separate stories, set in three separate eras, sounds a good one, a likely way to explore concepts of chance and circumstance, the accident of birth, the luck of the draw, the universality of whatever. Yet you don't really get much of that, or anything else, from the juxtaposition. The first story, set in 1966, is all right, a bit more conventional and optimistic than normal for Hou, but communicating a strong sense, for all its slowness, of the fleetingness of life. The second segment, set in 1911 and going over some of the same ground as Flowers of Shanghai, affects the numbing, the dumbfounding device of silent-film intertitles for dialogue and no sound effects. (For some reason, we can nevertheless hear people sing in live performance, albeit dubbed.) The final segment, present day, brings an almost welcome cacophony of traffic, pop music, cellphones, etc., but it loses focus on our central pair. The whole thing doesn't quite add up. You'd have better settled for just One Time. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd