Based on a 54-page short story that Eileen Chang started writing in the 1950s and finished in the '70s, Ang Lee's latest foray into forbidden love is as monotonous and disaffecting as Brokeback Mountain was gripping and immediate. It will be best known as the film for which Lee received the NC-17 rating, but its sex scenes are no more provocative or enlightening than those on HBO's Tell Me You Love Me. (In both cases, it's amazing how something so cold is expected to generate so much heat.)
Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the early to mid-1940s, Lust, Caution is a beautifully shot and painfully prolonged soap opera in which a Chinese actress with a patriotic theater troupe (Wang Chia-chih, played by Tang Wei) is enlisted to kill the head of the secret police (Mr. Yee, played by Tony Leung), who is collaborating with the Japanese. Several years after the plot initially goes awry—the wrong people were killed— Wang once more ingratiates herself into the Yee household, where she begins a torrid, often violent affair with Mr. Yee, for whom there's a fine line between romance and rape.
What Chang wrote about eloquently and succinctly—how easily the most noble intentions can be corrupted by love, or at least the promise and smell of it—Lee and his writers lose in translation. They're so enamored of the details—a mahjong game that lasts forever, during which things are suggested and hinted at and drooled over—that they often lose sight of their leads, whose relationship is all but buried till 105 minutes into a movie better boiled down to half its running time.
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Barbara Segal 10/04/2009 11:30:09 PM
I totally disagree with your dismissal of this film. Ang Lee is a superb director who never loses sight of the human drama that drives every great story. His characters in "Lust, Caution", are every bit as complex and compelling as those in "Brokeback Mountain." This is a director who acknowledges the repercussions of the choices we make and don't make- whether they are to become a collaborator to save our necks, give up our true nature for the sake of society, or lose one's virginity to, ostensibly, hurt the enemy. He is one of the greatest director's working today, and I think that "Lust, Caution" will, in retrospect, be much more acclaimed than it is in this current climate of Chinese paranoia. Oh, yes, the sex scenes: incredibly passionate, real and truly emotionally moving. With not a word uttered, this man and woman made a voyage together from superficial lust and seduction, to absolutely vulnerable intimacy. That alone is storytelling at its finest.