Lust, Caution
Director: Ang Lee
Starring: Tony Leung, Tang Wei
Runtime: 158 mins
Rating: * * * *
Based on Eileen Chang’s short story, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution explores emotional brutality in a way that eschews Brokeback Mountain’s worthiness and recalls the more subtle approach he used in The Ice Storm. Only in the last act, when Lee wishes to justify its setting in the Japanese occupied Shanghai, does the film begin to make you feel every minute of its two and a half hours.
Lee personally cut the film by 7 minutes so that it could be screened in China. The sex scenes were cut, yet upon watching the film this decision seems impossible. In a conceptual sense they are absolutely essential. The initial scenes of Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) training herself with a co-conspirator are the confirmation of a predatory nature already insinuated through her status as the theatrical group’s leading lady, and is developed in a fascinatingly acted power-play. The first union between Mr Yee (Tony Leung) and Wong is a frightening, borderline rape. Its intensity is drawn from the knowledge that the towering masculinity on display is being undermined by the fact that we know his victim is to be his executioner. The sex is never embarrassing, perhaps because it lacks both Showgirls’ zoological noises and Irréversible’s grittiness.
Refreshing too is the absence of complete emotional breakdown in a film released for the awards season. The only scene of sentimental vulgarity happens in the theatre, where Lee is perhaps suggesting such nonsense should remain. It could even be a nod to himself, given that he directed the Brokeback scene in which Michelle Williams rains her Hollywood tears onto cheap dishes, as her husband forgets his ranch-hand day job.
A masterclass in restraint, control, and precision acting, Lust, Caution’s only faults lie in its shoddy editing and the meagre characterisation of all the characters outside the leading pair.
