Director Ang Lee has followed up his controversial 2005 hit and pop culture punchline, Brokeback Mountain, with another film that is getting more press for its sexual content than its beautiful construction.
Lust, Caution is a tale of college drama club militants that join the resistance during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai from 1938 to 1942. Making her big screen debut, actress Wei Tang embodies the dreary destiny of nearly all well-intentioned revolutionaries: their youthful nationalism eventually cedes to a sense of loss, betrayal, and resignation.
Channeling the war-period Hollywood seductresses that captured her imagination, Tang alternates the quiet burn of Ingrid Bergman with the raw looseness of Marlene Dietrich. She plays these roles in an effort to go undercover as well as lure and sabotage an occupation torture specialist, played by the great Tony Leung.
Leung, the Asian screen’s greatest star, once again goes places that few of Hollywood’s current luminaries would ever risk exploring. Interestingly, this feels like a westernized Asian film in many ways, likely influenced by the international flavor of the film’s crew.
Though the film has received an NC-17 rating for Lee’s keen substitution of violence from the war with rough sex, it’s centered on subtlety. Gestures, short phrases, tasteful camera movements and lighting, and impenetrable performances dominate the film. The nudity and fornication don’t arrive until Lee has already cozied up to the audience with his sense of grace, balance, and sensitivity, and then Lust, Caution explodes like a mortar blast.
– Mike Hobart
Lust, Caution
Director: Ang Lee
157 Minutes / 148 Minutes (edited version), Focus Features
Opened 9/28/07 in limited US release
Focus Features: www.focusfeatures.com
[youtube CizN-DvGhrc]