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Lust, Caution: Into the heart of a honey trap

 
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 27, 2013 8:33 pm    Post subject: Lust, Caution: Into the heart of a honey trap Reply with quote

Title: REVIEW: The Critics: Into the heart of a honey trap

THE MAIN EVENT: Ang Lee's follow-up to Brokeback Mountain is a passionate epic of love and espionage: Lust, Caution (158 mins, 1Cool Directed by Ang Lee ; starring Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom

Source: The Observer (London, England). (Jan. 6, 2008): Arts and Entertainment: p15.



Document Type: Movie review

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2008 Guardian Newspapers Ltd.. Guardian Newspapers Limited

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Full Text:

Byline: PHILIP FRENCH

ANG LEE's Brokeback Mountain, with its frank scenes of gay sex, was the first major movie to open here in 2006. Two years later, his Lust, Caution , which has heterosexual scenes of almost unparalleled frankness for a mainstream picture, is the first major film to open in Britain in 2008. Like Brokeback Mountain , it will certainly end up on many lists of the year's 10 best. The Taiwanese-born Lee is a true auteur.

While moving from genre to genre, period to period (and most of his films are set in the recent or distant past), he never appears to repeat himself, yet he constantly pursues personal themes and his films contribute to a distinctive oeuvre. One of his recurrent concerns is with people facing crises, often in changing times. Another is the generational conflict between fathers and children.

The most interesting, however, is of characters forced to adopt masks, to dissemble, to conceal their true nature. This can be homosexuality ( Brokeback Mountain, The Wedding Banquet ), political allegiances (the superb Civil War western Ride With the Devil ) or, in its most extreme form, Hulk (generally regarded as his only real failure), where the comic-book hero attempts to suppress the destructive green monster that lurks inside him.

These themes come together in different ways in Lust, Caution , which, like Brokeback Mountain , is expanded from a short story by a woman writer, in this case by Chinese author Eileen Chang, who died in California 12 years ago at the age of 74. Set in Shanghai and Hong Kong between 1937 and 1942, it's a moody espionage thriller much influenced by the Hollywood film noir, particularly Alfred Hitchcock and exotic melodramas of Oriental intrigue. But events are seen entirely from the point of view of Westernised, middle-class Chinese men and women and taking place within that community. This is not the China of Pearl Buck or JG Ballard's Empire of the Sun

The film's central character is Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) who we first meet in 1942 Shanghai, posing as the sophisticated Mrs Mak Tai Tai from Hong Kong in the circle of the well-off, mahjong-playing wives of top-level Chinese collaborators living within the protected Japanese enclave. They're like the pampered wives of Nazi leaders and quislings in occupied Europe who don't inquire too closely into their husbands' activities and avert their eyes from the atrocities around them.

The horrors and humiliations of street life in Shanghai are as convincingly re-created as the cosmopolitan suavity that managed to carry on in wartime. We realise, however, that Wong doesn't quite belong to this milieu and that she has a covert relationship with Mr Yee (Hong Kong star Tony Leung), the local secret police chief, rooting out opponents of Wang Jingwei's collaborationist government. In a suspenseful scene, dressed in Western clothes and a hat that Sylvia Sidney would have worn in a movie of that time, she takes a taxi to a German restaurant and makes a clandestine, clearly coded phone call which we immediately recognise as a message designed to trigger off an assassination.

At this exciting juncture, Lee interrupts the narrative for a flashback, lasting nearly two hours, to Shanghai four years earlier before the Japanese have established their stranglehold. Wong is now an innocent university student who's been left behind when her father left for England with her brother. Passionate about the theatre, she's invited to join a theatrical troupe run by the handsome nationalist Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom).

Her first suggestion is that she play Nora in A Doll's House , but he insists upon staging patriotic, fund-raising plays with her as a rousing peasant heroine. She dazzles audiences, they cough up for the cause and she's on her way to a sort of stardom. But Kuang and the other leaders have a different future for her. They form an independent cell of the resistance movement and move to Hong Kong, casting her as a seductress, a honey trap for the treacherous Mr Yee, a symbolic target protected by several bodyguards. To prepare her for the role, she must lose her virginity to one of her comrades, a dislikable womaniser, though she really loves the dedicated zealot Kuang.

This is essentially the plot of Hitchcock's Notorious , one of the Master's subtlest works, in which US intelligence agent Cary Grant plays on traitor's daughter Ingrid Bergman's guilt and buried patriotism to manipulate her into marrying a German spy in Rio. (Lee alerts us to this by showing Wong watching Bergman in her first Hollywood movie, Escape to Happiness .) Wong attracts the attention of Mr Yee, but before the group of inexperienced terrorists can corner its victim, its plans are rumbled.

To protect themselves, they're forced into their first act of violence and there ensues an extremely messy, dragged-out murder in which these amateur conspirators discover just how difficult it can be to kill a man. In real life, we think of the protracted death of Rasputin. In movie terms, Lee would be thinking of Paul Newman trying to kill the Stasi thug in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain

Wong flees from the scene only to discover, three years later, that she has an appointment with destiny in Shanghai. Kuang, now a seasoned member of the official resistance movement, draws her back into politics. Once again, she is forced into the company of the vindictive, ruthless Yee to lure him to his death. But now their relationship is consummated in ferocious sexual encounters. These acts of fearsome sadomasochistic abandon are his way of seeking oblivion, a respite from the guilt instilled by his treachery, his torture of his own people, and the certain knowledge that America's entry into the war means the defeat of Japan and his own destruction.

But he also loves her. In acting out a role, the morally and emotionally involved Wong becomes, partly through their transgressive sexual intimacy, a participant in his personal tragedy. The con sequences prove to be more complex and troubling than those in Notorious

Lust, Caution is an excellent thriller. It is also for Lee an important inquiry into the divided lives of his parents' generation. The script by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, Lee's American collaborator as writer and producer, is a fine piece of work. Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, whose films include Amores Perros and Brokeback Mountain , and production designer Pan Lai have given the film a mood and appearance of cool, exotic menace. The score by French composer Alexandre Desplat, who wrote the music for The Painted Veil and The Queen , is a subtle blending of East and West with neat samplings of Hoagy Carmichael's 'Stardust' and Elgar's Enigma Variations . Lust, Caution is a triumph for international cinema.

PHILIP FRENCH
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
"REVIEW: The Critics: Into the heart of a honey trap: FILM: THE MAIN EVENT: Ang Lee's follow-up to Brokeback Mountain is a passionate epic of love and espionage: Lust, Caution (158 mins, 1Cool Directed by Ang Lee ; starring Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom." Observer [London, England] 6 Jan. 2008: 15. Infotrac Newsstand. Web. 27 Feb. 2013.
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