Film Review of Lust, Caution
Latest Film from Brokeback Mountain Director Ang Lee
Starring: Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Lee-Hom Wang
Taiwanese-born Ang Lee is the director of Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997) and Brokeback Mountain (2005). He is also well known for his 2000 film Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), which brought Chinese film to a new western audience and became the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in the US.
Based on Eileen Chang's 1979 Novel
Lust, Caution is an espionage drama set in Hong Kong and Shanghai during World War II. The film is an adaptation of a short novel by Chinese author Eileen Chang which was first published in 1979. The screenplay was written by James Schamus, who also wrote screenplays for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm.
Like many of Lee’s previous films Lust, Caution deals with secrecy, with suppressed passion, and lovers who must assume false identities. The story begins in 1938 in Japanese occupied China.
Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) is a shy drama student left in China after her father has escaped to England. She joins a patriotic drama group lead by the charismatic Kuang Yu Min (Lee-Hom Wang). Kuang persuades her to take part in his plan to assassinate a major collaborator, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), who is responsible for the torture and killing of resistance fighters. She is to pose as Mrs. Mak, the sophisticated wife of an official played by another member of the theatre group, and by befriending Yee’s wife (Joan Chen), get close to Yee to enable Kuang’s group to kill him. The plot works at first, and Wong and Yee embark on a passionate, sado-masochistic affair in which, although they admit to their mutual distrust, they are irresistibly drawn to one another.
Featuring Tony Leung, Tang Wei and Joan Chen
Lust, Caution looks beautiful in a muted, wartime way. Mrs Yee and her friends, who gather to play Mah Jong and indirectly decide government policy, look authentically glamorous with their immaculate hair and makeup and vintage costumes. The scenes featuring the wives, notably the very beautiful Joan Chen, best known to western audiences for her roles in The Last Emperor and Twin Peaks, are some of the best in the film and provide most of the small touches of humour in the film.
The performances are all good – newcomer Tang Wei perfectly captures Wong’s gradual loss of innocence and Tony Leung is chilling as Mr, Yee. Lust, Caution won the Golden Lion, the most prestigious award, at the 2007 Venice Film Festival. Although the film has received criticism for being over long, the drawn out periods of tense inactivity interspersed with extreme violence reflect the way civilians live in war.
Lust, Caution received a great deal of publicity on its release because it featured a number of explicit sex scenes which Ang Lee refused to cut. Although the resulting NC-17 rating that the film received in the United States would usually mean greatly reduced box-office takings, it is a mark of Lee’s stature and confidence as a film maker that he insisted the scenes stay. Whether they actually serve their intended purpose is debatable. The ‘are they or aren’t they?’ nature of very graphic sex scenes in films can detract from the passion and intensity they are meant to portray: it’s often better to leave some things to the imagination.
