In the Mood for Lust! Ang Lee’s Steamy War Picture Is the Most Honest Political Flick in Years
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LUST, CAUTION
Running time 157 minutes
Directed by Ang Lee
Written by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus
Starring Tang Wei and Tony Leung
Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, from a screenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, based on a short story by Eileen Chang, seems to have been discounted by many reviewers because of its extremely explicit sex scenes. These scenes are certainly steamy enough to make the old Production Code Poohbahs roll over in their graves. Yet these envelope-pushing expressions of carnal passion are also very astutely character-revealing in a manner consistent with the horribly brutal and treacherous period in world history with which Lust, Caution is profoundly involved in both its literary and cinematic forms.
The point is that there is a massive misunderstanding involved in the suggestion that the movie is in any way a trivial exploitation of a trivial story of little political or social significance. Ironically, this was a charge leveled at Eileen Chang (1920-1995) by the left-leaning Shanghai literati of the 1940’s, during which time Shanghai and much of China were occupied by the Japanese, with the help of Chinese puppet government officials. Chang’s own husband was both a collaborationist and a philanderer, and she consequently soon divorced him. I said “ironically” a few sentences ago because Chang’s own bitter experiences made her much more aware of the perverse twists of human nature in times of political chaos than did her one-sidedly sloganeering literary critics of the left. Actually, Chang was a more tellingly insidious social analyst with her endless mah-jongg games than were her foolishly idealistic literary contemporaries.
As a consequence, Lust, Caution is one of the few honestly observant political films, totally devoid of retrospective feel-good propaganda, that I have seen in years, and its characters are thereby perceptively portrayed all the way through to the almost unbearably bitter end of the narrative. The reconstruction of 1940’s Shanghai that Mr. Lee and his skilled collaborators have achieved on a huge Shanghai soundstage plunged me into a world and a time I knew very little about beforehand, and made me a witness to a pair of remarkable character studies, of two chillingly unromantic sexual partners. To make matters even more deviously complicated, one of the partners has a double identity. A patriotic college student named Wong Chia-Chi (Tang Wei) masquerades as a married woman named Mak Tai Tai in a naïve student plot to first seduce and then assassinate a prominent collaborationist official named Mr. Yee (Tony Leung).
That is quite simply all there is to the essence of the narrative, the bare bones, if you will. If one doesn’t accept the initial premise that radically inclined young people in China, Europe or the United States are capable of monumental follies when they confront an evil occupying force assisted by paranoid, resourceful and treacherous traitors in their midst, then Lust, Caution may seem boring and improbable. My own reaction was quite different. Of course, I have never found myself in such a situation, but Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, about Charles Lindbergh and his America Firsters’ winning the 1940 election over Franklin D. Roosevelt, has given me at least a familiar parallel with the situation in which Chang wrote her drenched-with-irony short story, which Mr. Lee and his writers have labored valiantly to transfer to the screen in fleshed-out images and audible dialogue and sounds faithful to the comparatively cryptic clues in the Chang story.
In the film’s production notes, Mr. Lee describes the challenge: “To me, no writer has ever used the Chinese language so cruelly as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) and no story of hers is as beautiful or as cruel as Lust, Caution. … Making our film, we didn’t really ‘adapt’ Zhang’s work, we simply kept returning to her theater of cruelty and love until we had enough to make a movie of it. Zhang is very specific in the traps the words set. For example, in Chinese we have the figure of the tiger who kills a person. Thereafter the person’s ghost willingly works for the tiger helping to lure more prey into the jungle. The Chinese phrase for this is wei hudzuo chung. It’s a common phrase and was often used to refer to the Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese occupiers during the war. In the story, Zhang has Yee allude to this relationship between men and women. Alive, Chia-Chi was his woman; dead, she is his ghost, his chung.”
When it is decided by Wong’s student cell that she reciprocate Mr. Yee’s clear interest in her by going to bed with him, her maidenly virginity suddenly becomes an obstacle to the assassination plot inasmuch as her cover story in getting into the social circle of Mr. Yee’s wife, Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen), is that she is supposedly married to “Little Mak,” a fictitious businessman who is always traveling abroad to Singapore and other Asian locations. Hence, it is decided, with Wong’s consent, that in her new identity as Mak Tai Tai she should be initiated into a plausibly married state by one of her circle, Liang Jun Sheng (Ko Yu Lien), the only one with “experience,” albeit “only with whores.” Next Page >
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Absolutely one of the most best reviews of Lust, caution. Insightful interpretation of its title. Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks for saving us all $10 as there is now no reason to see the film since you recounted 90% of the story in your review.
Frigging moron
Sarris is out of his mind--with all that auteur-crap and psycho-babble. Lust, Caution is an awful movie, as well as an awful adaptation of Eileen Chang. The Village Voice review by Robert Wilonsky is much more to-the-point: "It's amazing how something so cold is expected to generate so much heat." Anyone can "get" something out of the movie by intellectualizing over it, as Sarris does, but the real heat is simply not there--on the screen.
Very good reviews of Lust, caution. Thanks.
Ang Lee has given a nearly perfect demonstration of how to adapt a short novel and, with or without conscious, corresponding to the theatrical theory of Stanislavski:every parts, minor or major, serve the theme of the whole piece. All details help to build up the character, the story, the nearly lost history. The facts are not copied. The reality is filtered so as to reveal the human comedy and the heart (weakness) of human-being facing his fate. No commercial element is added if it is not qualified for the function.
Leaving the cinema, my mind is still haunted by the moments, dramatic, touching but realistic. The film arise my pity for man and my thanks for having a chance to watch a great work.
Sarris is absolutely right. The criticism that the eroticism is
"cold" misses the point. It perfectly corresponds to the characters' contempt and suspicion of each other. Ang Lee has produced another masterpiece.
For me, this is Ang Lee's best work to date. I actually didn't like Crouching Tiger or Brokeback.. If you didn't like those movies, maybe you'll like this one.
Thank you for one of the fairest reviews out there for a brilliant and disturbing film. It matters little what the plot holds - it's the unfolding, the unravelling and the astonishing performance of the actors, especially Tang Wei, that is worth watching, over and over. Watch it once to get the story/plot, but again to understand the layers of emotional complexity juxtaposed against this brutal period. Yes it is cold, as cold as if Bogart turned out to be Nazi collaborator and killed off Bergman, but that's reality, not a Hollywood movie - the reality of betrayal, of Darwinian ethos and cold-blooded mass murder in that period of history. Eileen Chang was even more ruthless in her short story than Ang Lee, but thankfully, bot of them did not spare us the cold thrust of reality as she understood it.
This is the best review to date. People who thought Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was a masterpiece, would not like this film. But it is they who lack taste.
Thank you for the review. I appreciate the extensive research you have done before you start critiquing the film. I'm pretty disappointed at some movie critics who obviously have not done any homework before they spat out strings of negative comments, and sadly some are from reputable newspapers. Simply irresponsible.
I'm very familiar with the original work and Ang Lee has done a wonderful job in capturing the essence of the story.
Thank you, Mr. Sarris, for narrating and explaining the plot and psychology of the main characters. It definitely helps people understand the beauty of Eileen Chang and Ang Lee's masterpiece.
This would make a wonderful companion piece to Godard's recently re-released "La Chinoise," another film about well-meaning but ultimately inept revolutionaries whose actions lead to tragedy. I'm glad I saw Ang Lee's film, which I really liked and thought was seriously under-rated, before reading Sarris' review where, once again, he gives away major plot points. Nevertheless, this was an intelligent, thoughful critique. By the way, I thought the sex scenes depicted how perverse and twisted the relationship was between the two lovers, as well as their power struggle.
Thank you very much for this review.
I've read the original book and most of Chang's work during my youth. My family has a strong link to the background era and places. I must say that Ang Lee has done a great job in creating that world.
It is quite something to see it on the screen as opposed to reading it on pages. If an audience thinks that once you know the ending/ story, you don't have to see the film. This is probably not the movie for that particular audience. (That being said, I bet everyone knows the ending of WWII when they goes to Saving Private Ryan,?)
Here is the English equivalent of the Chine Phrase, "wei hudzuo chung", in cae anyone cares to know,
"To play the jackals to the tiger"
Thank you for the review. The initial reviews were negative and I suspect this was the outcome of a political calculus--- NC17 movies always do badly. But I think that this movie is a masterpiece, and the world has grown. Now the reviewers are now battling bloggers and you and me and thousands of others, so it is easier for great work to be recognized.
I have to admit that while I liked Brokeback Mountain very much, I did not think it was anywhere near as profound as this film. After seeing this, I want to revisit Brokeback Mountain, and the Hulk, and so on, because I am sure that there is a lot in there that I missed.
This movie, to my mind, is the first to capture the essential disappointment of WWII, a disappointment which was felt by many who lived through the era, and which I learned about through my grandfather, who suffered as a slave laborer.
WWII, which we now see as a heroic struggle between good and evil, for the participants was most of the time a battle between evil and slightly lesser evil. The Nazis exterminated and tortured, and the allies bombed civilians. The japanese conducted medical experiments, and the Americans burned soldiers in caves alive. While the moral calculus that separates the acts (it is so clear to us today) was so remote for the participants that it might as well not exist. Mostly they saw monumental evils on all sides.
While right and wrong exist, the voice that separates the two at times like this is very weak, and requires an ear that's carefully attuned. There are no clear-cut objective markers, and there is plenty of propaganda from all sides. But the voice is there, and some people heard it. Their only choice was to support the atrocities of one side over the worse atrocities of the other.
This movie sets us up inside this (to us) clear moral situation, and begins to whittle away the moral clarity using the most personal of motivations--- sexual pleasure. The heroin is made to choose between serving the weak voice of justice and serving her own immediate desire, which speak with a loud voice.
Sexual desire is often strongly linked with domination and submission, and much of the politics of fascism derived its power from this link. This movie, and the period, does not shy from making the domination explicit, and making the link between fascism in politics and domination in the bedroom clear. The lust of the submissive is enhanced by the cruelty of the master, and his job as a torturer makes him all the more desirable.
The sexual activity binds the two characters in a personal bond which deafens the heroin's ears to the weak voice of justice. The voice recedes further and further until it is entirely silent.
The final scenes mercilessly forces us to witness the triumph of evil, a temporary triumph in historical terms, but a complete triumph from the point of view of all the film's participants. This is a most disturbing unsettling vision, and to my mind justifies the NC17, regardless of any sex. It strips the color and joy from the world to witness this brutal, inverted moral order, and it requires considerable maturity to recover.
But the movie lets a little bit of light through. The heroin spares her own life, knowing that she is likely to be tortured and killed, so she can show her solidarity with the friends that she betrayed. This means that she only betrays them in a momentary weakness, She does not give herself completely. But that moment of weakness is enough to ensure her death and that of her friends, and this moment of weakness must serve as a warning to others. I want to thank Eileen Chang and Ang Lee for sounding that warning so clearly in our time again, since we need it now too as much as then and perhaps more.
I have been disappointed with all the critics who dismissed this film as too slow, too long, nothing ever happens, sex is too ugly and " I don't get the ending, it's improbable that she would do it". One feminist blogger couldn't understand why Wong should even like Mr. Yee!
So I am glad I read Andrew Sarris' brilliant review of this film. Many critics just don't get it. This is a film about moral choice and female psyche, about self and politics, about the grayness of collaborationists and the cruelty of the Japanese, the Communists, and the Nationalists. There is no Hollywood-style resolution or redemption but plenty of nuance, ambiguity and moral grayness which, I guess, dooms this film at the box office and in the eyes of the critics. One critic complained that there were too much subtitled dialogue and not enough revealing action.
People have no problem with two gay cowboys wandering about Brokeback Mountain for two hours, but they have a problem with the 2+ hours of Lust, Caution because it's in a foreign language, staged in a foreign land, in a foreign war that we don't understand, and most of all, in the nuanced culture of Eileen Chang's Chinese female world. They wanted a heroine like the one in Black Book, a slapstick and one-dimensional movie that everybody compares Lust, Caution to (in an unfavorable way)
In fact, Chinese audience found the film too fast-paced. They wish Ang Lee would take his time because much is revealed about war time China in the mah-jongg games, in the characterizations of the tai-tai's, in the students, in the psyche of the occupied, and most of all, in the sexuality and desire of domination and submission. Lust, Caution not only became the highest grossing film in this year's Chinese film industry (and I include Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan into this mix), but it has become an iconic film, a cultural phenomenon. Writers are using the term "post-Lust, Caution" the way they use "post-modern" in describing the unwrapping of previously taboo subjects: China's collaborationist history and Chinese female sexuality and psyche.
Ang Lee made a second-rate kung fu movie with kung fu women spider-walking unrealistically on trees, a cave sex scene so reminiscent of 1000's of formulaic HK kung fu movies starring 2 very annoying and absolutely chemistry-free characters, an almost absent plot to the whole shebang and almost certainly one of the most confusing and frustratingly pointless endings in movie history, gave it a cool name like crouching tiger hidden dragon and it became a hit.
He got it right with brokeback mountain, and again this time in lust, caution with its cruel, bitter, yet strangely passionate protrayal of a doomed love affair betw Tony Leung (in top form, as is most times) and the mind-blowingly talented Tang Wei, set against a beautifully (ironic,I think) crafted backdrop of 1940's japanese-occupied shanghai and they call it a turkey.
Maybe the title wasn't cool enough?
Thanks for the review. I hardly bother reading up on a film after watching it but having been completely mesmerised throughout the 2 hours and 40mins i wanted to understand it a hell of a lot more. At times it wasn't the most enjoyable film but for some reason its stuck in my head much more than anything else i've seen in the last few years. If i want to watch an enjoyable film i'll stick on Armageddon with Bruce Willis or Roadhouse.
Still don't really understand why she did what she did at the end but the fact that i believe she would is the key. We don't have to understand everyone's actions to make it believable.
I just saw this movie now and thought the review was very good . Actually perhaps among the best I've read. Almost every negative review stated it to be a cold and almost emotionally devoid movie. I found it to be on the contrary, the attraction between could be seen from the first scene, but it was acted with great subtlety. Him being very important to the Japanese he could not afford to let his guard down not for one moment. No matter how much he lusted for her, he could not afford to show her fully how he felt as other women had attempted to do him wrong. As with her there was one particular scene I found to be very important it is when they were making love and then she puts the pillow on his head as if ready to suffocate him, get the job over and done with, but once again the lust conquered the caution. The other reviewers I don't think really understood the nature of the sex scenes as they were so much more different than they are in American movies when the passion and emotion is always so exaggerated and apparent. I feel as though the reviewers who gave this a negative got it wrong, with the exception of a couple who gave justified reasons for not enjoying it. Sarris' review of the movie was spot on as I found it to be one of the most beautiful shot movies, perhaps along with House of Flying Daggers.
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