Ang Lee's Lust, Caution--a movie for grown-ups

10/9/07

Lust, Caution
Directed by Ang Lee

A lot has already been written about Lust, Caution, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, some of which is very favorable, some less so. TVOR will keep her comments fairly brief--she liked it a lot. Lust, Caution is based, like Ang Lee's last film, Brokeback Mountain, on a short story, this time by Eileen Chang. The film is set in China in the late 1930's and early 1940's, when the Japanese occupied the country. A young woman joins her university theater group, and after some stage success, the group decides to use their acting skills to get friendly with one of the more appalling men collaborating with the Japanese, and then assassinate him. The collaborator is very security-conscious and the young woman becomes his lover in order to allow her co-conspirators to get close enough to do the deed. The film is rated NC-17, and yes, the sex is explicit. It's not gratuitous, though--it's actually character-driven. The acting is very good, particularly Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (of In the Mood for Love and 2046) as the bad guy and Joan Chen as his wife. The young woman is played by a newcomer named Tang Wei. In this film, emotions, motivations, and desires are complicated and not always easily understood. Let's see, what does that remind TVOR of? Oh, yeah. Life.

Video notes:

Ang Lee has directed a variety of films in both Chinese and English. If you've missed any of these, you might want to check them out: The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Brokeback Mountain. TVOR has not been able to bring herself to watch The Hulk, so can't comment on that one.

And do check out Tony Leung in Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love if you've missed that one along the way.