Oscar-winning director Ang Lee’s new film, “Lust, Caution,” is such a challenging, defiant film that you leave it feeling slapped around, but at the same time
exhilarated by Lee’s boldness. Less than two years after being anointed with Hollywood’s highest honor, he’s gone off and
made a film likely to
confound American
expectations.
“Lust, Caution” is rated NC-17, almost entirely subtitled and, in terms of subject matter, unabashedly foreign. The only thing about it that speaks to Hollywood is its mood, a glorious homage to the classic films of the 1940s, particularly espionage thrillers like Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” Hitchcock played erotic chess matches with his characters. Lee does the same, but strips them naked for the game.
Our heroine, college student Wang Chia Chi (Tang Wei) is a fan of those films, and in her darkest hours is likely to lose herself in the cinema (we see her weeping through the film that made Ingrid Bergman a star, “Intermezzo”). She’s an actress herself, perhaps too talented for her own good, because as a young Chinese woman living under Japanese occupation during World War II, the only role available to her is that of a professional seductress.
She stumbles into the role, really, having met up with a group of politically inclined drama students at her college in Hong Kong. They’re led by Kuang (Wang Leehom), who is passionate about his cause and handsome enough to melt Chia Chi’s heart, although her attraction is unspoken. They’re all fairly innocent, but they want to fight back against the Japanese, so they devise a drama of their own, to be played entirely off the stage, with Chia Chi assuming an undercover identity.
Their target is a married man named Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a Chinese collaborator with the Japanese, whose main function is suppressing the resistance movement. To that end, he’s an expert torturer and interrogator. He’s also an admirer of women, and in direct contrast to the students, whose bumbling is comical, he is self-assured and commanding. For Chia Chi, there’s something alluring about being a pawn in his hands, even as she is charged with leading him toward checkmate.
Ang Lee shows us every detail of Chia Chi and Yee’s affair, from their first, brutal, sadomasochist encounter to their explicit, NC-17-deserving lovemaking as the affair goes on. (It turns out there can be such a thing as too much sex in a film.)
The attraction makes her angry, but she loves the passion and responds. She’s a young woman, and this is the only outlet for passion that she’s offered by her country, her culture, and even by her closest allies. She convinces herself of her role, but because she also knows herself to be a good actress – from the first time we see her onstage she becomes confident of her talent – she has to continue to question any seeming conviction.
This is a woman used by war, turned into a prostitute, really, and unable to separate truth from fiction, not just in her mind, but in her heart.
Leung is almost disturbingly convincing as Yee, but this is Tang Wei’s movie. It’s her first film role, and a jaw-droppingly good debut.
“Lust, Caution” *** 1/2
NC-17 for some explicit sexuality. 2 hours, 38 minutes. Directed by Ang Lee; written by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus; from the short story by Eileen Chang; photography by Rodrigo Prieto; starring Tony Leung, Chiu-Wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom, Anupam Kher; Opens today at the Mayan Theatre.
