Roger Ebert (and many others) have wrote eloquently about this director and I had been meaning to give him a look for quite a while. I tend to be one that likes cinema where words are secondary in telling a story or setting a mood (In the Mood For Love is a a great example of what I am talking about, as are Terence Malick movies). This director is known for pioneering a sort of meditative cinema that goes above and beyond those movies.

The film is broken up into three separate stories (from different eras) and the two leads are in each of them. The first story show the female as a the hostess in the pool hall in the 1960s. The second shows the woman as a prostitute in a broth in the 1910s. The third shows the woman as a pop singer in modern times. The overall movie is most effective when you put the three movies next to each other. I think it did a great job showing how the plight of women changed over the years and how men were usually a deciding factor in their fate.

The problem with this is that you had to sit through a ton of.... really.... slow.... scenes... to get that reward. Again, I am perfectly happy to watch a scene where no words are said for many minutes (Serio Leone also comes to mind) - the story was not advanced in many of these scenes. Also, I don't think that any of the individual movies could have been movies on their own. That is absolute proof that the sum of the parts was definitely much better than the individual parts. I wanted to like it more than I did.

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