Lust, Caution
Directed by Ang Lee
Only Ang Lee would make a movie titled Lust, Caution. It’s about the wrathful yet constricted sexual relationship that develops during World War II between a Chinese student radical and aspiring actress, Wang Jiazhi (Tang Wei) and the Chinese traitor Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), who collaborates with the Occupying Japanese in Shanghai. This film displays its morality in its reticence. It’s the real Eastern Promise—the movie Ang Lee has always been working toward.
Lust, Caution brings out an ethnic commitment that Lee never summons in his Western movies: Brokeback Moutain, Run with the Devil, The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility and The Hulk (the best of them). The lead characters Wang and Mr. Yee suggest aspects of Ang Lee’s own meek artistry. Wang takes to acting to fulfill her need for attention and her maidenly attraction to the firebrand activist and theater major Kuang (Lee-Horn Wang), while Mr. Yee veils his masochistic impulses behind a facade of propriety and political rectitude. What does it mean that Ang Lee watches these screwed-up characters with unusual sympathy?
The S&M lovers’ depravity and eventual combustion holds attention in that non-compelling Ang Lee way. Despite the sex scenes’ brutality and full frontal nudity, Lust, Caution is as unerotic as a Merchant-Ivory film. No wonder Ang Lee won an Academy Award for the timorous Brokeback Mountain. He makes movies that the bourgeoisie can approve—full of high intentions but showing limited expression and shy artistry.
Every shot here looks sensuous, yet is unmistakably second rate—the filmmaking equivalent to prestige magazine fiction. Sure enough, Lust, Caution is based on a short story by Eileen Chang, but Ang Lee’s imagination (and screenwriter James Schamus’ tasteful adaptation) avoids any intensity and authenticity. As Wang and her fellow actors/revolutionaries befriend, then plan to assassinate, Mr. Yee, they recall the deception plot of Bertolucci’s The Conformist and the national identity crisis of Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon, but Lust, Caution lacks the narrative verve and glory of those movies.
Ang Lee practices melodrama tropes fastidiously. Wang’s bad-girl sexual sacrifice is etched in her face the moment she realizes her romantic, trusting self is gone forever. And Mr. Yee seems consumed by sorrow: Leung is no longer the heartthrob of 2046; his frown resembles José Ferrer as the stealthy, saturnine pervert in Lawrence of Arabia. But these referents are mere signposts for Ang Lee. Not juiced by movies like directors of the French New Wave, he remains placid, conventional.
Key scenes in Lust, Caution show Wang’s favorite pastime—moviegoing—as more important to her than sex. At showings of Suspicion and Penny Serenade, she witnesses Shanghai audiences’ irritated response to war documentaries that break the romantic spell. The misery descending upon their consciousness also infects Ang Lee’s evocation of history; his wan romanticism matches wan political commitment. He lacks the gift to tell a story, then make meaning in a visual form that becomes sensual and ecstatic. Truth is, the very idea of lust/caution contradicts cinephilia.
Directed by Ang Lee
Only Ang Lee would make a movie titled Lust, Caution. It’s about the wrathful yet constricted sexual relationship that develops during World War II between a Chinese student radical and aspiring actress, Wang Jiazhi (Tang Wei) and the Chinese traitor Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), who collaborates with the Occupying Japanese in Shanghai. This film displays its morality in its reticence. It’s the real Eastern Promise—the movie Ang Lee has always been working toward.
Lust, Caution brings out an ethnic commitment that Lee never summons in his Western movies: Brokeback Moutain, Run with the Devil, The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility and The Hulk (the best of them). The lead characters Wang and Mr. Yee suggest aspects of Ang Lee’s own meek artistry. Wang takes to acting to fulfill her need for attention and her maidenly attraction to the firebrand activist and theater major Kuang (Lee-Horn Wang), while Mr. Yee veils his masochistic impulses behind a facade of propriety and political rectitude. What does it mean that Ang Lee watches these screwed-up characters with unusual sympathy?
The S&M lovers’ depravity and eventual combustion holds attention in that non-compelling Ang Lee way. Despite the sex scenes’ brutality and full frontal nudity, Lust, Caution is as unerotic as a Merchant-Ivory film. No wonder Ang Lee won an Academy Award for the timorous Brokeback Mountain. He makes movies that the bourgeoisie can approve—full of high intentions but showing limited expression and shy artistry.
Every shot here looks sensuous, yet is unmistakably second rate—the filmmaking equivalent to prestige magazine fiction. Sure enough, Lust, Caution is based on a short story by Eileen Chang, but Ang Lee’s imagination (and screenwriter James Schamus’ tasteful adaptation) avoids any intensity and authenticity. As Wang and her fellow actors/revolutionaries befriend, then plan to assassinate, Mr. Yee, they recall the deception plot of Bertolucci’s The Conformist and the national identity crisis of Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon, but Lust, Caution lacks the narrative verve and glory of those movies.
Ang Lee practices melodrama tropes fastidiously. Wang’s bad-girl sexual sacrifice is etched in her face the moment she realizes her romantic, trusting self is gone forever. And Mr. Yee seems consumed by sorrow: Leung is no longer the heartthrob of 2046; his frown resembles José Ferrer as the stealthy, saturnine pervert in Lawrence of Arabia. But these referents are mere signposts for Ang Lee. Not juiced by movies like directors of the French New Wave, he remains placid, conventional.
Key scenes in Lust, Caution show Wang’s favorite pastime—moviegoing—as more important to her than sex. At showings of Suspicion and Penny Serenade, she witnesses Shanghai audiences’ irritated response to war documentaries that break the romantic spell. The misery descending upon their consciousness also infects Ang Lee’s evocation of history; his wan romanticism matches wan political commitment. He lacks the gift to tell a story, then make meaning in a visual form that becomes sensual and ecstatic. Truth is, the very idea of lust/caution contradicts cinephilia.
