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PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 2:55 am    Post subject:

Lust, Caution ****
By LARUSHKA IVAN-ZADEH - Friday, January 4, 2008

From Sense And Sensibility to Hulk to Brokeback Mountain – you can never tell where the heck Oscar-winning director Ang Lee will jump next.

Yet, astonishingly (aforementioned steaming green turkey aside), you're pretty much guaranteed excellence on arrival.

This latest lavish offering is no exception. Lee's first return to his Chinese roots since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an exquisitely involved, super sexy World War II-era spy thriller set amid the political intrigues and mah-jong table machinations of Shanghai high society.

A pretty young virgin girl (Wei Tang) is co-opted into a patriotic student drama group. Soon, in a manner amusingly familiar to fans of Team America: World Police, they compel her to 'use her acting' to infiltrate the household of top-level Japanese collaborator Mr Yee (a revelatory Tony Leung) in order to assassinate him. She is told to stop at nothing to seduce him, but because she falls for her enemy what will win out, lust or caution?

Based on a short story by Chinese author Eileen Chang, and unfolding in luxuriant flashback, it's at heart a cruel, passionate, highly charged romance in the film noir mode: all murdered innocence, dangerous performance and entangled deception. Even in bed, and savagely bonking the bits off each other (I'd be amazed if they didn't actually 'do it'), the central characters are frustratingly inscrutable.

But the 'strong sex' the BBFC warns us of is less titillating than the ravishing period detail: the pleasure this movie gives your eyes borders on the erotic.

A film that rewards repeated viewing – and no, not just for naughty stuff; the multilayered depths begging for a good probing should satisfy even the most ardent chin-stroker.

http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/films/article.html?in_article_id=82407&in_page_id=27
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 5:08 am    Post subject:

LUST, CAUTION 8/10
Running time: 157 mins
Starring: Tony Leung, Tang Mei, Joan Chen, Johnson Yuen

After wowing audiences and critics alike with his film of forbidden love in the shadow of a cowboy hat in Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has made his first Chinese language film since his breakthrough smash Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While the era and subject matters are quite different, it's an equally rewarding affair.

But first let's talk about sex, as the movie has not been mentioned in the press without an aside about the supposed controversy concerning its adult nature. Yes, the two main characters engage in prolonged bouts of lovemaking, and yes some of it is violent in nature. But it's integral to the story, and really nothing that Western audiences won't have seen before. It may have offended Chinese censors, but they are after all the same people who banned such nefarious efforts as Borat and Over the Hedge.

James Schamus' script - based on the popular short novel by seminal Chinese author Eileen Chang - is a complex affair that rewards close inspection. It's set in Shanghai around the time of the Second World War and follows a group of young radical actors who decide to target a Japanese official (this was a period when Japan occupied much of China).

To do so they recruit a beautiful if naive young girl in order to catch him in a love trap. He is paranoid and afraid for his life but cannot resist her charms, and it's a story that takes some years to unfold. The two leads, Tony Leung - who may be familiar to audiences here from appearances in the works of Wong-Kar Wai - and newcomer Tang Wei are graceful, subtle and spellbinding.

Undoubtedly some audiences may baulk at the film's languid nature, but I found it increasingly captivating, leading to a terrifically directed finale. Lee is one of the best directors around - even his mah-jong sequences are a lesson in the art - and this is another great triumph. We can now almost forgive him for The Hulk.

Paul Hurley

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/reviews/lust-caution.html
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 9:28 am    Post subject:

Lust, Caution
ALISON ROWAT
January 03 2008

Star rating: ***
Director: Ang Lee
With: Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen

For a director often noted for his cool sensitivity, Ang Lee has a flair for generating brush fires in the media. His Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain shattered its share of taboos, and since Lust, Caution took the Golden Lion at Venice last year its graphic sex scenes have been the subject of endless "did they, didn't they?" discussions.

While one can sympathise with Lee's dismay at his painstakingly realised wartime thriller being given the Knocked Up treatment, he protests too much. Sex is to Lust, Caution what dance is to Singin' in the Rain. There is more to his film, far too much in fact, but nothing to sear a hole in the screen or the imagination like the physical drama between the two leads.

When the picture opens in Shanghai in 1942 there is little clue to the passion that will eventually break loose. Rodrigo Pieto, Brokeback Mountain's cinematographer, paints the city in shades of greys and black, the only flashes of colour coming from the blood red in the Japanese flag. Shanghai is occupied and its Chinese citizens preoccupied with the business of survival. In one home, however, a group of ladies is more concerned with the business of mah-jong and gossip. Mrs Yee is holding court, with her shy young friend, Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) among those in attendance. The only event for which the women draw breath is the arrival of Mr Yee (Tony Leung), man of the house, local dignitary and collaborator. The exchange of pleasantries that follows sets a pattern the rest of the film will follow. Although little is apparently going on, messages are being sent, clues set down and it will be a long time before the end game becomes clear.

Make that an agonisingly long time. Heeding the warning in the film's title, Lee resists any temptation to reveal too much of his story too soon. He insists on having everything, including a detailed picture of the politics of the time, in place before the tale proper begins, and his film suffers as a result. Indeed, by the time he leads us by the hand to the bedroom door, a whole hour and a half in, the exhausted and bored viewer may be more in the mood for nothing other than a nice cup of tea. But bear with him. When Lee lights the blue touchpaper, his movie takes some thrilling, beautifully executed, unforgettable turns.

advertisementBased on the story by Eileen Chang, the basic premise is sketched in swiftly enough in a series of flashbacks. Wong Chia Chi, a student, has been left alone after her father's departure for England. Joining her university's am-dram group, she finds both a band of friends and a cause. War is approaching and, as Japan's intentions towards China become clear, Wong enlists in the resistance. Her handlers, homing in on what they see as her only value, assign her a mission: she is to be the honey in the trap that snares the quisling Yee.

As the seduction gathers pace, the film becomes less about the act of sex itself than what it means. Yee and Wong become as intimate as it is possible for two people to be, yet theirs is a sexual dance of many veils, with each trying to conceal as much as possible from the other.

The scenes are certainly graphic, but the physical gymnastics are nothing compared to the mental workouts going on. This is sex as interrogation - brutal, raw, animalistic, sometimes tender, and always shocking in its intensity.

Tang Wei puts in an astonishing performance in what is her first film. Though the character is exploited at every turn, the Ang Lee of Sense and Sensibility, ever the feminist film-maker, never allows her essential dignity to waver. She is no cardboard cut-out Mata Hari; this is a complex woman who is under no illusions about what she is doing, and what it is doing to her. The scene where she spells this out to her handler is one of the film's best. Though the older man is meant to be the flint-eyed master to her novice, it is he who is left quaking with shock at her honesty.

Tony Leung succeeds in making a many-faceted monster out of Yee. Flitting from torture chamber to bed chamber, he reveals just enough of a conscience to keep the character interesting. These flashes of humanity, and the odd hint of sly humour, are never enough to lift the gloom that hangs heavy over the film.

There's a weightiness to Lust, Caution that suits the story but is ultimately the movie's undoing. Though never muddled, it is overcrowded with themes, history, characters and its own ambitions. With an ending that rivals Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for excitement, Lee shows what a near-masterpiece his movie could have been had his focus been narrower. A clear case not of "lust, caution", but "information overload, beware".

http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/features/display.var.1938682.0.Lust_Caution_18.php
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Hong



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PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 3:44 pm    Post subject: The French reaction


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 7:25 pm    Post subject: More French raves


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PostPosted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 5:39 am    Post subject:

From the London Review of Books, an interesting review, comparing the art of writing and of film making.

At the Movies

Michael Wood

Lust, Caution
directed by Ang Lee (2007)

Lust, Caution is billed as a film about sex and espionage, lots of both, and occasionally it looks like such a work. All its interesting moments, however, are about something else: style, masquerade, glances, silences. Each character in the movie has a movie running in his or her head, and when a young woman called Wong Chia-chi (played by Tang Wei), about to become a temptress setting up a collaborationist Chinese official for assassination, sits in a cinema and weeps copious tears, we know she will never be able to cry in this way outside the movie house. She is watching Ingrid Bergman, in Intermezzo, I think, and no one in her film – either in Lust, Caution or in the fiction she is acting out in the story – will ever declare his love, or say anything, as directly as Leslie Howard does in that Western melodrama. There is a risk of cliché in this thought, but I am only following the director Ang Lee down this path, and he avoids it through cleverness. In the film moderately scrutable orientals play inscrutable orientals pretending to be inscrutable orientals.
The setting is mainly occupied Shanghai during World War Two, with a long flashback set in Hong Kong. A group of students, including Wong Chia-chi, excited by their work in the college theatre (‘a string of rousingly patriotic history plays’ is the phrase in the story by Eileen Chang on which the movie is based), decide to shift into the drama of real life, and infiltrate the house of Mr Yee (Tony Leung, last seen, by me at least, in Infernal Affairs), head of intelligence for the Japanese sponsored puppet government. One of the students pretends to be a businessman, and they set Wong up as the businessman’s wife, complete with fine clothes and fancy make-up and local shopping contacts, so that she can become first a friend of Mr Yee’s wife and then the enemy’s mistress. All proceeds as planned, though very slowly: not because the operation is difficult or because Mr Yee’s defences are keen but because this is a two and a half hour movie made from a forty-page short story. The story is all about its ending, and so is the film; but the film has to find creative ways to linger.
In an interview Ang Lee generously talks about all the things a writer can do that a filmmaker can’t, but his problem is exactly the reverse: how to do all kinds of things the writer didn’t need to. About halfway through the movie the problem becomes very clear, although not disabling. Wong lures Mr Yee to the apartment where she is supposedly living with her husband. He is dropping her off after a long romantic dinner, perhaps he will come in? The conspirators are waiting behind the door, guns at the ready. He doesn’t come in, because he is cautious as well as lustful, more cautious than lustful at this moment, and the conspirators can’t run out and shoot him, it seems, nor will they have another opportunity until right at the end of the movie – although you might think that Mr Yee could be bumped off during any one of his later, supposedly torrid sex scenes with Wong. The plot and the interest of the movie are in direct conflict with each other here. The plot says Mr Yee can’t be killed now, and his relationship with Wong therefore slowly develops. The interest is all in the relationship; no matter what poor schemes a writer has to come up with to keep the man alive. There is nothing of this problem in the Chang short story.
But if this little logical hitch – and many other touches in the film, like the tender reconstruction of old Shanghai, the wartime mood, the sheer beauty of so many of the frames – makes the political thriller seem implausible, or even irrelevant, it also points us towards the work’s deepest concerns, already more than hinted at in the story (‘She had, in a past life, been an actress; and here she was, still playing a part, but in a drama too secret to make her famous’; ‘Her stage fright always evaporated once the curtain was up’).
And here film has a real advantage over a written text, since in a film story about disguise the disguise is so irrevocably what we see. We can’t get behind it, we can only imagine what else there is, whereas a text too easily (in certain contexts) balances out appearance and reality: nothing to choose between them in terms of perception. Ang Lee plays with this idea in a manner almost worthy of Hitchcock, using the looks of his actress (and of course her considerable acting talents) to set up the riddle of identity he is so interested in. In her ‘real’ person Wong is plain, almost ugly, sad, angry, a little girl abandoned in a complicated and unfeeling world – except when she is at the movies. In her role as temptress she is as glamorous as wardrobe and cosmetics can make her, with gestures and idioms that belong so perfectly to the role that we know she can have learned them only one way: from the movie script. We can certainly believe that Tang Wei can play both roles to perfection, since she is manifestly doing just that. What we can’t believe – or faint-heartedly need to pretend to believe, for the sake of the storyline – is that the plain girl could ever play the glamorous star. There are just two people here; or just a movie. When Wong brings Mr Yee home to his almost-assassination, she pauses at the door, playing with her keys, and turns to him with a sultry look that is so over the top it is a sheer delight. If you have a chance to log on to imdb.com you can see a clip of this scene. It’s not, I think, that she is actually tempting. Only that she is a perfect picture of what temptation is supposed to look like. Hard to see how Mr Yee could resist.
The sense that one person can’t really play – or can’t just play – another person is just what the movie is after. One can become another perhaps, but that’s a different story. Similar issues lurk in the movie’s much touted sex scenes, which are not only too beautiful but too theoretical to be titillating. But that doesn’t mean they’re not interesting. In their first session together Mr Yee virtually rapes Wong, the suggestion being, I take it, that an uptight collaborator can only bully a partner into submission, even when she’s entirely submissive enough already. The second session is the visual set piece, with four pairs of limbs all over the place, as if the couple were trying to compose a difficult fleshly jigsaw puzzle rather than have sex. I thought of Roland Barthes’s remark about certain scenes in Sade: ‘complexity of combinations, contortions of the partners, everything is beyond human nature.’ Then, in their third encounter, Wong and Mr Yee discover the missionary position. I couldn’t decide whether this development was meant to suggest a softening, even a normalising of the relationship or, more interestingly, the possibility that the missionary position is literally the last thing that would occur to you if you thought sex was all about secrecy and conspiracy. Either way, these contortions and straightenings of the body represent what is happening in the mind and heart.
‘Why did she do it?’ James Schamus, co-author (with Wong Hui Ling, who wrote Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon among other films) of the screenplay, asks in a handy book about the film.[*] Do what? At the last moment, with the assassination intricately set up, Wong finds she has to decide whether to go through with it – that is, do nothing but let it happen – or tip Mr Yee off. What she decides determines the ending of the film, of course, but why does she have to decide? Isn’t he still the enemy, doesn’t she still believe in her mission? The film is more delicate than the story here, since it clearly suggests Wong doesn’t even know why the question has come up. It’s not that she has finally fallen in love with the monster, or that sexual intimacy, even of the most calculating kind, gets in the way of murder. Be cautious about lust, that story would rather sentimentally go, because even simulated lust may turn you into a human being. No, it’s rather that Wong lives in a world – Ang Lee and his writers want us to think about a world – in which performance is everything, or everything you can know for sure. There is another self beyond the current action perhaps, beyond the disguise – a hard-working patriot behind the glamour and the sex, for example. But Wong can’t securely find that self any more than we can see it on the screen: it’s just a hypothesis in both cases. And if it’s a hypothesis rather than the ground of her action, that action itself must turn into a question mark.
For a good part of the time I was watching the film, I was trying to understand my sense of déjà vu, of displacement, my feeling that this wasn’t Shanghai and Hong Kong but somewhere else. The time was right, and the props and the costumes and the make-up: World War Two, old cars, belted raincoats, cloche hats, beautiful people pretending to be harrowed people. Then I got it. This was France under the Occupation, the transposed location that of a film by Louis Malle or Bertrand Tavernier, say, which in turn is not a place but an allegorical landscape, a zone of the imagination where issues of conscience, of collaboration and resistance, are permanently staged. And where, Lust, Caution suggests, there may be no escape from the scene, no return to whatever world there was before the movie took over.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n02/wood01_.html
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Hong



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 6:19 am    Post subject: More raves


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Marie



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:38 am    Post subject:

Quote:
So a lot more of the subtext of this film, which is so inaccessible to Americans, is immediately understood in France, which has also long held a fascination with the East. There is a deeply ingrained admiration for Chinese (and other Asian) civilization, a reverence for the beauty and estheticism that informs so much of Asian cinema. This is not a new phenomenon and dates back even further than France's colonial past (in what was then called Indochina). So these responses to Ang Lee's film are not only characteristic but unsurprising.


Well, Hong, I will grant you that France's war time experience does create a resonnance with the story in Lust, Caution. But I am not sure that the French "appreciation" of Asian culture is as pure as you would have us believe. The French were among the primary creators of "orientalism" which has colored Western views of Asia and the Middle East for centuries and, according to citizens of these regions, quite negatively. The French colonial experience was also hardly happy in Asia. We must be careful about romanticising the French relationship to things Asian (good) and Asian people (maybe not so good, especially those who wanted their independence).

Marie
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Hong



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 11:23 am    Post subject:

Greetings, Marie. For obvious reasons (I am stranger to this forum) I think you misread me, or maybe read in quite a lot into what I left unsaid. I am very familiar with France's colonial adventures, not only in Asia but in the Arab world, and with the resentment they breed (and rightly so) in many parts of the planet. In fact André Malraux, the author I quote in my signature, and who is revered as a hero of the Spanish Civil war and won the Prix Goncourt for La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate), a novel openly sympathetic to the Chinese revolutionaries who went on to destroy so much of China's culture, was also, in an earlier incarnation, the thief of Angkhor Vat, who vandalized the temples for his own profit. The French are full of contradictions, but what I was saluting was their welcome for this film, which has received such a mitigated response in the Anglo-Saxon world (including Britain). And I do believe that the core of the empathy that is being expressed by so many French critics has to do with their common collective memory of war and occupation. Thanks for commenting.
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Marie



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 6:25 pm    Post subject:

Thanks for your clarification, Hong.

I think it must be acknowledged that Asians and non-Asians will view Lust, Caution differently because of cultural and historical differences. No matter how much a Westerner knows about, in this case specifically Chinese culture and history, it is always as an outsider looking in. We can "study" these cultures, but we will never be truly part of them in the same way someone born into the culture. I, as a Westerner, may appreciate aspects of the film based on my understanding of that culture, but the picture will always be much less complete and that understanding filtered through my own cultural experiences. And, as you say, the film is playing differently in France than it has in the Anglo-Saxon orbit. That the reviews have been split right down the middle in the US (I have a less complete picture of the British reviews) says something important about American culture. I think it is more pluralistic (or at least bi-polar) than most of us realize, be we Americans or non-Americans. I have been wondering since the first extremely negative reviews were published in some of American's most prestigious publications (New York Times, Variety, L.A. Times, etc.) what was precipitating such a negative reaction to a mere film. Clearly, there was something more at play that anyone was willing to say. Part of it, I believe, had something to do with the reviewers' expectations. Whatever they thought this film would be, it was not. What truly saddened me, reading those reviews. was how close-minded the reviewers were to something that was clearly outside of their normal experience of film. Rather than being willing to explore a very different set of possibilities, ones not driven by Western concerns, these influential reviewers castigated the filmmaker for making the film he wished to make rather than the one they wished he had made. The Hollywood entertainment industry is hardly known for its breadth, depth or profundity. How sad that this self-satisfied group of critics has bought into the Hollywood ethos to the point that they can no longer recognize a great film when they see one, and Lust, Caution is clearly a very fine and important film.

Marie
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Hong



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:10 pm    Post subject:

Marie, I wholeheartedly agree with you on both points, the cultural otherness which is fated to remain unbridgeable, and on the smugness and superficiality of so much that passes for criticism in much of the Hollywood-centered media. The New York Times critic, in particular, wrote a scathing but very revealing review of the movie, castigating Tony Leung in particular, as Mr. Yee, for betraying her memory of the "great, grave soul" he played in WKW's from In The Mood For Love.

As for me, as a Westerner, part of the seductiveness of this movie lies in the cultural tease to which it subjects me, the viewer. For instance, I don't play mahjong, have never seen it played, don't know its rules nor coded moves, so given the importance afforded to the game at key moments in the story, I can only watch with fascination and frustration, keenly aware of all that I'm missing. Likewise for a lot of the meticulously chosen physical background detail, which Ang Lee is famous for. Another example: it helps to know that Old Wu is an agent of the Kuo-Min-Tang, not of the Chinese Communists (as is often assumed in Western reviews), and that the portrait on the wall in Yee's study is of Sun-Yat-Sen, the first president of the Chinese Republic and father of modern China, a revered figure to patriotic Chinese of every stripe. Many, many more details escape me, which I hope to gradually learn about after I get the DVD and can really study the movie.

Lust, Caution, to me, is Ang Lee's masterpiece and in my opinion, Tony Leung's finest performance, on a par with his unforgettable characterisation of the Poet in Cyclo, by Vietnamese film maker Tran Anh Hung. I'm hoping to find the time to write a review of it soon and post it in the forum.[/b]
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 5:16 am    Post subject: Australian Reviews

From The Age (Australia): http://www.theage.com.au/news/film-reviews/bfilmb-emlust-cautionem-is-unsettling-powerful-and-profoundly-haunting/2008/01/17/1200419935417.html

Lust Caution is an unsettling, powerful and profoundly haunting film.

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a film of inexorable, slow suspense. When it explodes, it does so in devastating fashion, only to close over again and re-engage once more with its underlying tensions. Its sexually explicit scenes, more than 90 minutes into the movie, come as an abrupt, intense contrast to the restraint and oblique pressures that have gone before. Yet there is nothing gratuitous about them: they are essential to the film.

It's a movie about desire and brutality and how closely they can co-exist. It's about deception, and what it can reveal as well as what it can conceal. And it's about the nature of performance and what it, too, can hide and at the same time lay bare. Its setting is a politically turbulent location on the cusp of change, but the politics in this film are inextricably bound up with the personal.

It is based on a story by Eileen Chang, about Chia Chi, a young woman in World War II Shanghai who is caught up in a dangerous game. Chang, a popular writer of the 1940s, who spent the last half of her life in America, drew on some of her own experiences in occupied Shanghai, where her first husband was a collaborator with the Japanese forces. Lust, Caution was written late in her life; she began it in 1950, but did not finish it until 1979.

Chia Chi (chameleon-like newcomer Tang Wei) is an actress, as Chang describes her in the story, "playing her part, in a drama too secret to make her famous". She has been given the task, by her student comrades, of seducing Mr Yee, a leading collaborator who is in charge of security. In the story, he's a squat man in his 50s: Lee has cast the stellar Tony Leung Chiu Wai, an actor who can convey an extraordinary range of emotions with the barest flicker of an eyebrow. It's a subtle, minimalist portrait of a man whose motives remain shadowy, whose power depends on a combination of overt activity and torture.

Chia Chi is a solitary young woman without ties. An unexpressed crush on a student activist leads her to join his theatre group. She demonstrates a talent on stage: it takes her by surprise as much as anyone else. And then she's given a far more demanding role: she must turn herself into a brittle, elegant and knowing young woman who can move in the circles that Mr Yee and his wife (Joan Chen) frequent. If she can seduce him, she can make him an assassination target for the naive young activists, who are Nationalists, rather than Communists, although the film does not make much of this.

Different kinds of performance, from everyday hypocrisies to rousing propaganda theatre to political intrigue to Hitchcock roles, are threaded through the film. Chia Chi goes to the movies several times: the cinema is a place of identification and escape where she sees Hollywood films, and also a place of darkness where conspirators meet.

There is a compelling scene, towards the end of the film, in which Chia Chi sings a song for Mr Yee during an assignation in a Japanese tavern in the city. It comes from a 1935 movie called Street Angel: it was sung by Zhou Xuan, a popular, brittle performer whose life ended with a tragic breakdown. It's a complex moment in which Chia Chi loses herself in a performance of cultural, national and sexual identity.

Her role-playing puts her in extreme danger. She is also discovering something about herself, even as she is risking her life. The film is full of ambiguities about knowledge and awareness, and whether people choose to act on what they recognise. When choices are made, ambiguities remain, uncertainties about motive, emotion, knowledge, intention. Lust, Caution is an unsettling, powerful and profoundly haunting film.


From the Sydney Morning Herald: http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/a-dangerous-liaison-in-occupied-shanghai/2008/01/17/1200419934099.html?page=2

A Dangerous Liaison in Occupied Shanghai

Reviewed by Paul Byrnes

LUST, CAUTION has a lot of both. It may sound disingenuous but it's worth seeing for the beauty of its images, rather than just the sex.

The sex is often brutal and distressing, as Tony Leung, playing Mr Yee, the collaborating head of security in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942, rips and ruts at the tender young limbs of the startlingly good newcomer Tang Wei, playing Wong Chia Chi, an undercover resistance agent posing as Mrs Mak. It's realistic and passionate, but not really calculated to arouse.

The scenes in which people do keep their clothes on are absolutely calculated for sensual stimulation, from the fluid way that the director, Ang Lee, depicts the cunning Mrs Yee (Joan Chen) and her fragrant society friends playing mah-jong, to the black limousines ferrying dead bodies on the streets of Shanghai. The Chinese citizens are starving, but the shops on Nanjing Road are selling cakes and jewels to rich foreigners and collaborators wearing furs.

The Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who filmed Brokeback Mountain, Lee's last film, gives the city a desaturated look somewhere between monochrome and colour, a film noir beauty. The scenes in Hong Kong four years earlier are brighter but, in both cases, the images are overpoweringly gorgeous.

Lee is in love with the way China looked then, a China he never knew, since he grew up in Taiwan. That's not unusual among Chinese directors raised in exile. A nostalgic longing for the past is an artistic pose that goes back centuries in Chinese poetry and painting. Filmmakers in Taiwan and Hong Kong are almost all drawn to it as a way of reconnecting with their mainland heritage.

Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was partly an exercise in this kind of romantic lyricism, combined with the biff of Hong Kong kung-fu film foolery.

Lust, Caution is another thing entirely - a leap into the abyss of sexuality and betrayal, a confrontation with a woman's willing obliteration of self.

Eileen Chang's short story, published in 1979, six years before her death, presented Lee with an explosive cocktail of possibilities, the principal attraction being that it mixes sex with patriotism. Lee has said he was outraged by the story when he first read it three years ago. The patriotic war against the Japanese occupiers is a unifying force for all Chinese, an untouchable masculine mythology.

Chang, now considered one of the most important writers in modern Chinese literature, wrote about it in terms of one woman's sexual awakening, even as she is plotting the assassination of her lover.

That the mix remains provocative can be seen in reactions on different sides of the Pacific: the version released in China has 10 minutes cut out, mostly the sex; in the US, the film received an NC-17 rating, which, for a lot of conservatives, is akin to slapping an XXX rating on it. Neither culture is comfortable with the film's provocations - a good enough reason for Lee to attempt them.

As for its style, Lust, Caution is an amalgam of film noir and Chinese melodrama. Wong Chia Chi joins a patriotic theatre group at Hong Kong University in 1938. She is innocent and virginal, but a fabulous actress. Under the sway of the charismatic nationalist Kuang Yu Min (Lee-hom Wang), the headstrong troupe members become an unofficial resistance cell. They plot the assassination of the collaborator Yee like children playing at war.

Wong becomes Mrs Mak, a society beauty bored with a travelling husband. She joins Mrs Yee's mah-jong table and ignores the steely-faced Mr Yee. He is about to start an affair with her when he is called back to Shanghai.

Four years later, he is the head of torture for the Japanese occupiers, one of the most hated men in the city - and one of the most cautious. Kuang is now a serious resistance chief: he presses Wong to resume her identity as Mrs Mak and go after Yee.

Tony Leung has probably never played someone as hateful as this man - and that presents a dramatic problem. When he is at his most brutal, we wonder how she can bear to be with him. It's not all duty for her after a while, which is, of course, the point of the story - and the hardest to dramatise truthfully. And because the film is partly about performance, we are never sure what is truthful and what isn't. That contributes to a muddiness in the film's emotions that's potentially damaging.

Lee has said he thinks this film is harder for Western audiences to engage with than some of his previous films - in other words, it's more Chinese. That may be true, but I loved the intensity of the film, and Lee's ability to take Wei's performance through a long arc. This is a big movie, slowly built, impeccably controlled, achingly beautiful and dramatically complex.
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 6:39 am    Post subject:

Another unadulterated rave from France again, in L'Humanité, http://www.humanite.fr/2008-01-16_Cultures_Ces-temps-etaient-deraisonnables.

Just to give you the flavour (my loose translation):

Quote:
Here, Ang Lee presents characters straining to the limits of their strength to accomplish their destiny against the winds of history...

Lighting, costumes, music, everything contributes to the magnificence of the acting duo formed by Tang Wei, in her first movie role, and Tony Leung who was so dazzling in the movies of Wang Kar Wai. A young woman capable of every metamorphosis, from the painted porcelain of Mrs Mak to the activis Wang Chia Chi, a reed who bends but does not break. He plays a man who may (as is at times very briefly suggested) or not see himself for what he is. But very quickly the viewer doesn't know what to think, as double morphs into triple-cross and worse.

The scenes of sexual passion which bind the couple together, composed like classical paintings, define the movie. Ang Lee shows us the psychological and emotional underpinnings of the sex, the rage, frustration, magnet-like attraction, that wreak havoc with the heart of each character. Every gesture, every silence works at the deepest level. Absent here are any apologies for sacrifice to a noble cause, any inversion of roles between executioner and victim, any prurient fascination. Simply, dare one say, two people caught up in the most murderous of conflicts, who become each other's one and only. Bared of any moral connotations, their raw inner truths are what makes them human...

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PostPosted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 9:09 am    Post subject: Lust, Caution review

From the Prague Post. http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2008/01/23/crouching-desires.php

Crouching desires

Ang Lee's latest adds to the director's fame

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 23rd, 2008 issue

Is there a more empathetic director than Ang Lee? Though a quick glance at his films makes Lee seem daringly versatile (Sense and Sensibility, The Hulk, Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), his work shares one common trait: a humane understanding for the human condition that rejects simplistic labels such as “good” and “evil.”
Ang’s latest film, Lust, Caution, presents this innate humaneness in a tough tale of espionage, assassination and truly violent passion, set against a backdrop of Japanese-occupied China during World War II. The ostensible villain, a Chinese official who becomes a collaborator with the Japanese invaders, is shown as a scarred, loveless man who has a childlike fear of the dark. The heroes are earnest Chinese nationalists, whose schemes and bravado within the resistance falter to trembling when faced with real action.
Lust, Caution is based on a story by the renowned Chinese-American writer Eileen Chang, whose work was often set in the Shanghai and Hong Kong of the Pacific war years. Her novels and stories — considered by many literary critics to be the finest produced in Chinese mid-century — are also known for their frank assessments of love between men and women.
In Lust, Caution, a young student, Wang (Tang Wei), finds herself becoming involved with her university’s theater club, headed by the dashing actor/director Kuang (Lee-Hom Wang). The group’s patriotic melodramas stir their audiences’ resistance against Japanese imperialism, though the triumphant Japanese are soon overrunning Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Finding themselves at war, the drama students decide to lend their acting talents to the Chinese underground. They hope to entrap a notable collaborator, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), whom they plan to assassinate, by disguising themselves as wealthy sympathizers of the invasion.
Wang soon becomes the plot’s bait, after the cool, officious Mr. Yee begins paying attention to her when she attends the daily mahjong games that his wife (Twin Peaks’ Joan Chen) holds in their house.
Wang withstands much in her group’s plan. While she’s impersonating a married woman, in reality she’s a virgin, and the group decides that she must be “broken in.” If this weren’t humiliating enough, she then finds their plotting ruined by events (which include a distressing practice murder), and flees the now-bloody drama circle for an aunt’s house to reinvent her life.
As the Japanese invasion progresses, Wang again falls into the company of resistance fighters, and the original plan for Mr. Yee is dusted off. This time, however, the plan begins to succeed all too well. Yet as Wang becomes more involved with Yee, she begins to love him, which will take her to a point of wanting to destroy herself as much as him.
What roughly sounds as melodramatic as any of the students’ stage pageants becomes a taut, erotic thriller in Lee’s hands. The characters’ psychologies are complex. Indeed, it’s a shock to discover Wang falling for a man who’s lovemaking technique is, at first, indistinguishable from a rapist’s attack. But the damaged Yee’s underlying vulnerability (rawly expressed by Leung) is difficult for Wang to dismiss.
Lust, Caution has garnered much press for its sex scenes, which are full-on and brutal. Still, it’s the nakedness of the emotions conjured in this film that leave the most lasting impressions.
Not surprisingly, the sympathetic Lee is a consummate actors’ director, and he coaxes marvelous performances from both veterans like Leung and Chen, as well as newcomers Wei and singer Lee-Hom Wang. Wei in particular gives a startling multilayered performance, effortlessly moving from naive schoolgirl to world-weary underground agent.
The film’s colors are purposefully muted and gray to match the characters’ internal, moral terrain. Lee also does an excellent job of making us aware of the unfolding tragedy around Shanghai’s population of Westerners (tertiary souls in this drama), without resorting to sidetracks from the storyline.
Perhaps the greatest example of Lee’s humane storytelling comes, strangely, with the vicious killing of a man who stumbles upon the drama group’s plans.
As with the murder-by-asphyxiation in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, it’s seldom that one sees the sheer, horrific labor behind the taking of another’s life in film. Here, it becomes a terribly sad grappling with death, not so far removed from some aspects of love.
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 8:27 pm    Post subject: From the Athlone Advertiser (Ireland)

From the Athlone Advertiser (Ireland) http://www.athloneadvertiser.ie/index.php?aid=6434

Beautiful, disturbing and moving Chinese thriller

By Katie Moylan

Oscar winning director Ang Lee’s films all share the distinction of being beautifully shot, with great attention to visual detail.

His films are otherwise exceptionally different from each other in subject matter, ranging from literary adaptation (Sense and Sensibility) to medieval sword fighting epic (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), to revamped classic Western (Brokeback Mountain).

Lee’s films are beautifully realised, consistently a seamless combination of faultless acting by a carefully chosen cast, a solid script, and often stunning scenery.

Lust: Caution (or Se jie, in Mandarin) is a typically rich Lee film with the added ingredient of what looks very much like political critique. A thriller in the style of a 1940s melodrama, it takes place in Hong Kong and Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II.

Encouraged by young radical student Kuang (Wang Leehom), a young drama group in Hong Kong decide to take their thespian talents beyond the stage and use their abilities to serve the Chinese resistance. Their star actress Wong Chia Chi is chosen to go undercover, to try to snare the affections of Mr Yee (Tony Leung), a powerful figure in the service of the occupying Japanese forces.

From the start Wong is painfully torn between her duties to her co-conspirators, also her closest friends, and the mantle of the wealthy, glamorous, exporter’s wife she must pretend to be. As Wong’s situation becomes increasingly complex and she starts to fall for her ‘target’, the film focuses on her sharply divided loyalties and her efforts to reconcile them.

Lee’s films tend to be plot driven and this involved thriller is no exception. However, as in Brokeback Mountain and even in The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility, Lee is also adept at depicting emotional scenes with a light but respectful touch. Through the inclusion of several explicit erotic scenes Lust: Caution further explores the emotional connection achieved through sex which Lee first examined in Brokeback Mountain.

The two leads are excellent. As Wong, Tang Wei captures the conflicting emotions of innocent love and admiration followed by fear, anger, and yearning. Appearing in almost every scene, with the camera focused in close-up on her face, Wei carries the film despite being a relative newcomer. As Yee, the reliably superb Tony Leung equally displays a variety of responses. The two together are completely believable in a complex and unsettling relationship.

The relationship between Wong and Yee can be disturbing, not least because it begins violently. It becomes clear that their attraction is mutual, but it appears to be constructed out of despair and sometimes malice. Consequently, many of the scenes between Wong and Yee are absorbing and disquieting in turn.

Lust: Caution is possibly Lee’s most political film yet. In the sustained critique of the emotional horror of Wong’s duplicity, and of the desire to serve the Chinese resistance which initially drives her, the film reads as a criticism of the methods used by the resistance.

Lee complicates this impression, however, by showing the ostentatious appeal of Western goods available in Shanghai boutiques; at one point the camera lingers on fur coats, fine fabrics, and gaudy jewels in Shanghai shop windows.

Lust: Caution is also Lee’s most complex film, weaving an ambivalence into what looks on the surface to be a wartime melodrama. Born and raised in Taiwan, Lee’s criticism of the resistance might be understandable. Similarly the complex romantic relationship he portrays is perhaps necessarily emotionally fraught. The result is a beautiful if ambiguous film which remains with the viewer long after it has ended.
(Publication Date: 25/01/2008)
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