Lust, Caution / Se, jie
Director: Ang Lee. Screenplay: James Schamus, Hui-Ling Wang, based on the short story by Eileen Chang. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Film editing: Tim Squyres. Production design: Lai Pan. Music: Alexandre Desplat. Producers: William Kong, Ang Lee. With: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Wei Tang, Joan Chen, Lee-Horn Wang, Chung Hua Tou, Chih-ying Chu, Ying-hsien Kao, Yue-Lin Ko, Johnson Yuen, Kar Lok Chin, Su Yan, Caifei He, Anupam Kher, Liu Jie, Hui-Ling Wang, Hayoto Fujuki, Yuji Kojima. USA/China/Taiwan. Language: Mandarin. 157 min. 2007.
By David Sterritt
The place is Shanghai, the time is 1942, the background is World War II, and the first event in the story is a seemingly simple phone call that sets a violent act in motion. The movie then flashes back to 1938, when Hong Kong university student Wong Chia Chi joins a drama group that wants to oppose the Japanese occupation by staging patriotic plays. When they see the effect they have on their audience, the members of the troupe decide to escalate their efforts by assassinating a Chinese collaborator named Mr. Yee, using their theatrical skills to camouflage their identities and pull off the mission. Masquerading as a lonely wife, Wong seduces Yee, becomes his mistress, and leads him steadily to the slaughter until the situation spins out of her control, erasing all of the group’s preparations. But in 1941 they’re able to revive the scheme in Shanghai, leading to unanticipated outcomes for all concerned.
Eileen Chang’s short story telegraphs these occurrences in a small number of densely crafted pages; the screenplay by Hui-Ling Wang and longtime Ang Lee associate James Schamus fleshes out the details, expanding the tightly plotted tale into a brooding meditation on the interrelationships among love, power, sexuality, cruelty, greed, politics, fear, and loathing in a hyperemotional historical setting. The result is far and away Lee’s most imposing and impressive film, superbly acted and expressively directed from first scene to last. In some ways it’s an Asian analogue to Paul Verhoeven’s political thriller “Black Book,” which also focuses on a brave and intrepid woman confronting evil wartime interlopers in ways that challenge her ethics, her morality, and even her sense of self; but Lee comes more boldly to grips with the sexual dimensions of the intensely personal conflict, which pays enormous artistic dividends at the cost of a commercially harmful NC-17 rating from the American movie cops. The picture deserves the widest possible audience in its uncut version. Rarely have the imperatives of the sexualized mind and body been more articulately and intelligently explored on film.
