This film, we learn from its title, is about lust and caution. And after getting eyefuls of parts of the leads not normally put on public view, it is safe to say Ang Lee’s controversial (it was far from a critic’s darling and its content is so sexually-charged) Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival definitely warrants its Category III rating by the Hong Kong Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority.
At the same time, perhaps Lust, Caution would have been more appropriately entitled Caution, Lust since lust manifests itself much later in this cinematic adaptation (by James Schamus and Wang Hui-ling) of an Eileen Chang short story than caution. Indeed, one might even go so far as to suggest that caution only truly gets thrown to the wind very, very late in the picture. In any event, director Lee – perhaps operating with the same assumption as one of his characters that “movies are for people with time to kill” – has opted to go with a steady, layered, detailed and slow treatment for what plays out as more of a character study or WWII-era period drama than oft advertised espionage thriller.
Additionally, even while Tony Leung Chiu Wai gets top billing and figures most prominently on the movie’s publicity materials, Lust, Caution centres far more on the character audiences first hear referred to as Mak Tai Tai (Mrs. Mak) but soon learn is really named Wang Jiazhi. Making her feature film debut, Mainland Chinese actress Tang Wei is called upon to essay a character who can seem like a veritable chameleon (and is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese and English). And the fact that she manages to do so capably with lashings of verve and style helps the film go places, including those dark and hellish areas of the human psyche which one might not have expected its makers to want to enter.
Lust, Caution starts off in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Within 20 minutes or so though, it jumps back four years to British-ruled Hong Kong, where war refugee Wang – whose mother is no more and whose father has left her to fend for herself while taking her brother to safety in Britain – has become a university student and involved with an amateur drama group. And although she initially professes nervousness when called to try her hand at being a thespian, it is in no small part from her successfully starring in a patriotic play that she gets asked to take on a far more demanding and, as it turns out, long-term role: that of Mrs. Mak, the seductive resistance bait for a senior Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai).
The plot to assassinate Yee was first hatched by Wang’s fellow war refugee and university student, the good-looking Kuang Yumin (Wang Leehom). Early on in their relationship, it becomes pretty obvious that Wang and Kuang are physically attracted to each other. However, they never really act on these instincts. Instead, even when the time comes for Wang to sacrifice her virginity for her country, Kuang disregards his romantic impulses and leaves her deflowering to another man.
At the same time, as Wang later starkly – and startlingly – lays bare in a highly descriptive monologue, Kuang and the other men out to free China don’t seem to fully realize how psychologically damaging and physically demanding her efforts to win the trust and affection of their enemy target are. Indeed, at the risk of belittling the men’s war efforts, it can seem as though director Lee was seeking to point out here that many a victim in war – at the hands of both those who passionately believe they are in the right and others more pragmatic in nature – are not those directly targeted but people caught in ‘friendly fire’ so as to speak.
For all of these politicized musings though, Lust, Caution does seem to ultimately boil down to lust versus caution, quite a bit more than love versus country. As for how the story resolves itself, I will, of course, leave off disclosing the details. On the other hand, I feel compelled to point out that up until its climactic resolution, I was leaning towards the opinion that this might well be the best film I’ve seens thus far this year – only to come away feeling that the major fateful decision made by a character who had held me in thrall until then was seriously disappointing and, even more damningly, didn’t logically gel with so much of what had gone before.
Yvonne Teh
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