Lust, Caution - Ang Lee adds a touch of class to melodrama

[Sandy]

Title: Ang Lee adds a touch of class to war melodrama

Source: Cape Times (South Africa). (July 18, 2008): Arts and Entertainment: p2.



Document Type: Article

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2008 Independent Online
http://www.iol.co.za/

Full Text:

LUST, CAUTION. Directed by Ang Lee, with Tony Leung, Tang W ei, Joan Chen and Wang Lee Hom.

Review: KENNETH TURAN

IT'S unnerving to see Lust, Caution as the title of Ang Lee's provocative new film, because these states, each capable of obliterating the other, exist at the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. They can never be reconciled, and characters who are forced by circumstance to live on the knife's edge between them not only endure unbearable tension, but risk savage emotional destruction as well.

Just such a situation is the heart of Lee's intense, psychologically intricate and sexually explicit film worked from a short story by influential Chinese writer Eileen Chang about a disturbing love affair set in China during the years of its World War 2 occupation by the Japanese.

A brooding meditation on the unnerving power and terrible cost of emotional and political masquerades, the Chinese-language Lust, Caution gets under your skin with its examination of what qualifies as love and what does not. The reconciling of seeming opposites is evident not only in the title, but in almost every aspect of the film, starting with the casting of Tony Leung, one of the biggest stars in Asia, against the relatively unknown actress Tang Wei.

While the nearly two-hour, 40-minute Lust is as deliberately paced and as determined to take its time as the most rarefied art film, its story is an unapologetic wartime melodrama, centering as it does on spies, assassination plots and adultery.

Lust, Caution begins in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942, inside the residential compound for high officials of the Chinese collaborationist government, a well-guarded enclave where the soothing click of tiles punctuates a Mah Jong game among the wives of the powerful hosted by Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen).

Her husband, Mr Yee (Leung), head of the intelligence service of the collaborationist regime, makes a brief appearance at the game. The merest hint of a look passes between him and another of the wives, the svelte and sophisticated Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei).

Almost immediately Mak Tai Tai makes an excuse to leave the game. She goes to a cafe, where she makes a call, sits down at a table and begins to remember the past, specifically events in Hong Kong four years earlier, that the film then extensively flashes back to.

Mak Tai Tai, then called Wong Chia Chi, was, as were many Chinese at that time, a refugee, a young and innocent freshman at a university where she meets the idealistic and handsome theatre director Kuang Yu Min (Chinese pop star Wang Leehom). Impelled by her crush on the director, Wong Chia Chi attaches herself to his dramatic troupe. When Kuang wants to move from theatre to actual political action, she of course goes along.

Kuang's idea is to set a trap for and then assassinate Mr Yee, already a top collaborator. An entire fake life is to be constructed for Wong Chia Chi, assigned to remake herself into the wealthy young wife Mak Tai Tai, who is to befriend Yee's wife with an eye toward becoming Mr Yee's mistress, the easier to lead him to his death.

Wong Chia Chi falls easily into this impersonation, and Mr Yee is unmistakably attracted to her. But once this point is reached, nothing happens the way anyone anticipated. - Los Angeles Times

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
"Ang Lee adds a touch of class to war melodrama." Cape Times [South Africa] 18 July 2008: 2. Infotrac Newsstand. Web. 27 Feb. 2013.