'Lust, Caution's' Open Hearts Aren't For Closed Minds
The Sex Is Graphic, the Love Nuanced
By Desson Thomson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 5, 2007; C05
"Lust, Caution," a "romance noir" set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, makes a powerful case for love as a transcendental force that draws people together, no matter how perverse audiences may deem their relationship.
Director Ang Lee has created an affecting, minor-key ode to love, in the tradition of films such as "The Night Porter," "Dance With a Stranger," "M. Butterfly" and "Damage." In these dramas, the partners are morally questionable; their love becomes their only grace note. The tighter the outside world closes around them, the more they cling to one another, like victims falling together from a great height. And we are torturously caught up in this, feeling pity and empathy rather than condemnation.
Adapted from a short story by Shanghai-born Eileen Chang, who lived through (and set several novels in) this 1940s backdrop, the movie unfolds like a political thriller. But its real drama occurs within the hearts of two flawed people, drawn to each other despite a wartime atmosphere that casts them as adversaries. Their sadomasochistic sexual liaisons -- graphically depicted -- initially alarm us. But we come to understand how this aggressive behavior, seemingly laced with hatred and contempt, belies a growing emotional connection.
The 50ish Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) is the ruthless, debonair head of security for the collaborative Chinese government. Wang Chia-chih (Tang Wei) is a patriotic revolutionary in her 20s; she has drawn the short straw in her circle of student radicals to seduce and lure him into a deadly trap. When the inevitable affair takes place, she learns she has become entangled with a sadist whose brutal bedroom manner hides a tormented tenderness. Touched instead of hardened against him, she finds herself falling in love, and caught in a game of double deception -- against Yee and her compatriots.
In spite of the NC-17 rating, Lee makes lyrical if disconcerting poetry of their cruelly drawn affair; the director did something similar when he examined a clandestine love tinged with bitterness and regret in "Brokeback Mountain." In this world of Mahjong parlors and opium dens, where survival is the only virtue, the lovers are finding their own blissful asylum. And we're oddly moved by their hermetically sealed strength of purpose.
In a film where casting is a vital component in the edgy equation, Leung and Tang make a picturesque and dramatically compelling couple. Leung, best known as a swoony icon in art house romances such as "2046" and "In the Mood for Love," is cast wonderfully against type. Suddenly his delicate, almost feminine features are fraught with menace. And Tang, who makes her debut, firmly establishes herself as a softly persuasive screen presence for the future. In "Lust, Caution," her combination of grim purpose and almost ethereal tenderness bring a much needed personal dimension to the tragedy.
While the sexual scenes between them are explicit, they are also sensitively portrayed. It is the sweaty sensuality of their thrusting bodies, and the seemingly endless intensity, that makes these encounters seem so licentious, not the sex itself. The filmmakers, including screenwriters James Schamus and Hui-Ling Wang, are showing us the battle between two wills, not a pornographic peep show. (This subtle distinction has eluded the ratings board of the Motion Picture Association, which recently gave an R rating to "The Heartbreak Kid," a comedy that makes sight gags out of forceful, graphic sex, children snorting cocaine and even bestiality.) That something so pure as love can grow in such unseeming circumstances is testament to the one emotional state that binds most -- if not all -- of us.
Lust, Caution (157 minutes at Landmark's Bethesda Row) is rated NC-17 for explicit sexuality. In Mandarin Chinese with subtitles.
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Peeling Away The Layers
Ang Lee's Look at 'Lust'
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 5, 2007; WE36
Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee has made a movie about illusions. About what's real and what's imagined. About the stories we tell ourselves and the power they have over us. About patriotism, politics, love and betrayal.
"And it's about sex, too," he says, coyly.
Ohhhhhh, it sure is.
So much sex that "Lust, Caution," a subtitled flick set in Japanese-occupied China during World War II, was slapped with a rare NC-17 rating. (See review on Page 37.)
"First of all, I didn't know that rating still existed," Lee says with a laugh. "It seemed like that rating showed up in the early '90s and then disappeared."
Kind of, but the Motion Picture Association of America dusted it off for this occasion.
Lee, who won an Oscar for his direction of 2005's "Brokeback Mountain" and broke into an elite class of directors with the much-lauded 2000 martial arts film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," insists that he isn't worried about the rating.
Nor was he worried about it, he says, during the 12 straight days he and a skeleton crew spent filming three intricately choreographed sex scenes in a small sepia-toned room.
"It's a small exercise on life and death," Lee says by phone from Seattle before a screening of the film.
The 52-year-old director has thought and talked a great deal about sex in conjunction with this movie, based on a short story by the beloved Chinese writer Eileen Chang, who died in 1995. It follows a young Chinese student who transforms herself at the behest of a patriotic group of friends plotting to kill a vicious Japanese collaborator. To get to him, she must seduce him.
Along the way, in the midst of so much pretending, she, too, is seduced.
She has to pretend "so sincerely, it's real," Lee explains. "And who's to say real sex is not like that? That it's not about performance for each other.
"It's not just a physical act," he says. "I think it makes an immediate chemistry that can be a catalyst to love and to many complex emotions . . . and by all means it's great material for drama, which is meant to examine humanity. But we're shy to show it."
Lee says he is particularly shy. When he first read Chang's short story three years ago, he was appalled -- "I was like, 'How dare she?' " -- but the tale haunted him.
"It just kept coming back. I could feel the writers calling on me," he says. "Even recently I still felt like she was watching us, up there."
To do the story justice, the director says, the intimacy between the hardened intelligence officer (played by Tony Leung) and his innocent temptress (Tang Wei) needed to be profoundly honest, even in moments where it's jarringly cruel.
"It was very difficult for me to go through making those scenes," explains Lee, who plotted the tiniest details of each shot and verbalized every move he wanted his actors to make. "It's not natural. We're taught to be shy, to be subtle and modest about this. And we all have this sense of privacy. To peel that off and expose -- it can be disturbing."
The movie claimed top prize at the Venice Film Festival and has received positive reviews in China and Taiwan, but Lee is cognizant that it "seems to be really tailored to the Asian audience," with references to historical events and cultural traditions, such as the recurring presence of mah-jongg, a classic tile game.
As the film is released in the United States, Lee is most worried about the reaction his young star Wei will receive. Because of that, he says, the bedroom scenes were edited to focus on the drama between the two characters.
What remains, he hopes, are glimpses of an entanglement that "will provoke viewers to read more into it -- more than just sex."
- Re: 'Lust, Caution's' Open Hearts Aren't For Closed Mindsposted on 10/06/2007
建议咖啡店搞一个观后感创作比赛, 从绿茶开始(我首先弃权。。。。NC-17的片子,是从来不在Redneck的电影院放映的)
- Re: 'Lust, Caution's' Open Hearts Aren't For Closed Mindsposted on 10/06/2007
纽约市及周边也只有两家影院在放.
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