Review: “Lust, Caution”

Being a fan of Ang Lee, whose “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” masterpiece is one of my top 5 favorite films, I couldn’t resist tracking down the small art house theater in my area that was showing his latest work, which is out only in limited US release: "Lust, Caution."

The Eileen Chang short story that's the basis for Lee's adaptation is as economical as a wound ball of silk thread: Chang packs a lot of emotional yardage into a very small space as she examines, without demystifying the complex relationship between a young Chinese spy in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and the dangerous collaborator she has been assigned to seduce.

Reactions to Lee’s film range from fascinated to bored. I fall toward the latter to my disappointment. I can see that Lee admires Chang's story. But I would say Lee and his long-time screenwriting collaborators, Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, have stretched Chang's delicate story into a thin, underfed epic.

The life of "Lust, Caution" is poured into the last third; most of what comes before is a long expository flashback buildup, which I felt could’ve been told from the beginning and shortened--greatly.

The picture opens in Shanghai 1942, in the home of Mr. Yee (Tony Leung, one of Asia’s top leading men), security head of the Chinese government that’s collaborating with the occupying Japanese, where his talkative wife (Joan Chen) is entertaining a mahjong party of well-dressed friends. One of them is the beautiful Mrs. Mak Tai Tai (newcomer Tang Wei), the wife of a Hong Kong importer-exporter. When Mr. Yee stops by the table, he and Mrs. Mak share glances that indicate they’re somehow involved. But it’s later revealed that she’s also involved with young Kuang Yu Min (Chinese pop star Wang Leehom), who’s in the resistance.

Mak Tai Tai makes an excuse to leave the game. She goes to a downtown cafe in downtown, where she makes a phone call to Kuang and a group of other men, sits down at a table and begins to remember the past, specifically events in Hong Kong four years earlier.

Cut back to 1938 Hong Kong, where the supposed Mrs. Mak is revealed as college student Wang Chia Chi, an idealistic, naïve girl, who’s enticed into a rebellious, anti-Japanese theatre troupe by Kuang. She develops a crush on him and finds an unexpected calling as a natural actress, who inspires audience members to tearful cries of “China will not fall!” in her troupe’s first patriotic performance. When Kuang gets the idea to turn their group into an unaffiliated amateur resistance cell, she goes along and allows him to persuade her to take the Mak disguise so that she can get close enough to Yee to lure the traitor to his death. But the plot fails when Yee leaves abruptly for Shanghai to accept a promotion, escaping the group’s assassination attempt.

Flash ahead to 1941, when after some difficult years Kuang approaches Wang to resume her role as Mrs. Mak to attempt to seduce Yee again for the same purpose. Under the official auspices of the Communist resistance, Wang goes to Shanghai and this time entangles Yee in a stormy, passionate affair. The outwardly stoic Yee seems on the verge of abandoning his usual cautiousness to his desires, when Wang comes to a crossroad.

Not only are the mission and her life at stake, but so is her real identity. Her role as Mrs. Mak is not only a facade for Yee, but also a trap for herself. And soon she must choose whether it's more valuable to play a false person who is trusted and loved, or a real one whom she barely acknowledges herself.

Defining oneself is a favorite theme of Lee's. In this film, he makes some of his most devastating observations about human nature, finding in his main character a woman who has no identity until she creates one for others. In an early scene, Wang sits in a movie theater crying while watching “Intermezzo”; it's a telling moment because it immediately precedes her emergence as an actress and speaks to the connection between the fiction of a "character" and the emotion it generates within her.

She becomes consumed by playing Mrs. Mak, not only because she completely believes the truth of her role, but because the Yees believe as well. It makes her self-delusion that much more powerful, and when she eventually sleeps with Mr. Yee, their sex scenes are charged with deep emotional intensity because he expresses a need to reveal himself to another person and she feels the gratification of finally becoming someone. To her, convincing him she is Mrs. Mak is actually being Mrs. Mak, and it empowers her--both emotionally and physically--as a fully-formed person rather than the discarded daughter of an expatriate or some street urchin playing with patrician-class values.

At the same time, the real world frequently imposes its unflinching gaze on her gambit and reminds her that she isn't acting in some assassination play, but part of a real plot. In an early sequence that concludes her first "performance" as Mrs. Mak, Wang witnesses her fellow actors clumsily murder another collaborator--a sight too real and unglamorous for her to stay "in character." Later, she receives a precious stone ring that reveals Yee's love, in the process unleashing her own buried feelings. Both events reconnect Wang with her humanity, corrupted by playing her role of Mrs. Mak, ultimately showing her how she not only betrayed those closest to her, but herself as well

Punctuated by several skillfully photographed and intense, even sadomasochistic, love scenes, “Lust, Caution” presents complex characters. Yee, on the surface, appears to be a harsh, even hateful man. But his feelings for Wang bring out another side of him. The relationship between Mr. Yee and Wang with her divided identity is the central dynamic of "Lust, Caution." Both people play roles within roles, engaging in intricate double and triple games that get so complex they become ensnared in entanglements neither one anticipates or wants.

The one place the protagonists are naked, both literally and psychologically, is when they make love, and the sex scenes in "Lust, Caution" are both explicit and essential to illustrating the intensity of their relationship. The sex is graphic and rough. While they might not admit it, this appears to be the only place where the protagonists are honest with each other, where the complex, tortured, ever-changing relationship between them plays itself out.

Wei, Leung and Leehom are all brilliant in their roles. Lee manipulates their characters to evoke sad, beautiful and profound human truths. He pits the two halves of Wang’s character against each other and positions them against her two would-be suitors, Yee and Kuang, creating a dynamic where two men are fighting for two different women in the same frail frame.

Leung's Yee is a man full of secrets, and he finds in Mak a person in whom he can confide--if not the sordid details of his business, at the very least his tormented feelings. Meanwhile, Kuang vows to protect the shrinking-violet Wang from harm, but fails to recognize her real identity until it is too late, as she has already succumbed to the reassuring validation of the Yees' acceptance. (Her question to him--"Why didn't you do that before?"--after he kisses her is one of the movie's most heartbreaking moments.) Lee exercises control of these shifting emotional dynamics to not only maximize the drama in the last third of the film, but to show the desperate and destructive ways that Wang has sealed her own fate.

Thing is, these character subtleties weren’t obviously apparent to me on first, second, or third reflection--and not just because I spent almost half my time reading the English subtitles. I wonder how well the casual viewer will pick up on the character nuances that Lee wove into the film? Something I also didn’t understand was how Wang, after being clumsily initiated into the world of sex by a fellow actor in her troupe, found the seductiveness she needed to entice Yee, particularly in the moments before her first sex encounter with him in which he raped her. And I found it coincidental that she could sing a very touching song to Yee about how they were “needle and thread,” who would never part. I found myself wondering about Yee’s reasons for collaborating with the Japanese, whether he was in it for his own gain or he sincerely believed that working with the Japanese would benefit China? I found it interesting that Wang could speak English, but it didn’t seem relevant to her character and the story, so the few English scenes could have just as well been done in Mandarin. And Kuang’s competing interest in Wang gets a bit lost by the wayside as the story meanders along.

The bones for a great movie are in the film: The tormented femme fatale, the lethal but alluring man she must seduce, the exotic locales, the political intrigue--all punctuated by startling sex between lust-struck hunter and prey. But Lee doesn't zero in on them. He allows long gaps of silence to insinuate themselves unnecessarily between lines of dialogue. He also lavishes a great deal of attention on several shots of Wang sitting in a cafe, dabbing perfume on her wrists: The detail is straight out of Chang's story, but there, it's fleet and concise; Lee stretches it out, crushing it by attempting to load it with importance.

What Chang wrote about eloquently and succinctly--how easily the noblest intentions can be corrupted by love, or at least the promise of it--gets lost in the film. The film focuses so much on the details--like a mahjong game that lasts forever, but we Westerners still don’t understand--we lose sight of the lead actors, whose relationship is all but buried till the last 40 minutes or so of the film.

"Lust, Caution" (shot by Rodrigo Prieto) does have a polished retro-dreamy look. And Lee couldn't have chosen better actors for the cast. It's always a pleasure to watch Joan Chen. She doesn't have much to do here, but playing an aging, possessive beauty, she casts a quiet spell over the picture. Tang, with her fine features and always-questioning eyes, plays Wang with a deft balance of delicacy and toughness to stand up to Leung.

Leung's performance is less moodily romantic than any of those he has given in his work with director Wong Kar-Wai (including "Chunking Express" and "In the Mood for Love")--but here, he pushes beyond romanticism into unsettling territory. His Mr. Yee is at first unreadable, like a distant danger signal at sea that we can't quite make out through the fog. But later in the movie, as Yee's relationship with Wang deepens, he slips into focus. This may be the most unlikable character Leung has ever played--he's such an appealing presence that you can't imagine any director asking him to convey the ruthlessness that this role demands. But Leung pulls off the nearly impossible, making us feel sympathy for a man driven largely by selfish impulses, a man whose cruelty is almost dissolved by love, but not quite as he lets Wang meet her fate--with anguish.

Rated NC-17 for its intense sex scenes (which were cut in the Far East release for Chinese authorities), "Lust, Caution" shows flashes of craft and poignance, teasing people with what it could have been in my opinion.