Lust Caution

Lust Caution is a languid suspense film, directed by Ang Lee in 2007, noteworthy primarily for its extremely graphic sex scenes.  I'm not certain that the sex scenes are integral in any way to the story -- but they are certainly startling, staged in a titillating manner, and highly explicit.  The film is beautifully photographed and, if anything, directed in a way that is excessive, and, even, distracting -- when someone goes outside, the streets are thronged with period cars, rickshaws, and mobs of people.  We see long vistas, avenues in Hong Kong or Shanghai lined with marching soldiers -- the film is set during the Japanese occupation of China and there are people starving in alleyways, food-lines, corpses on the street.  The elaborate, and, visibly, expensive period detail, the sumptuous robes and gowns and enamel-lacquered interiors all seem a bit beside the point -- but the film intends to impress with these details and, although there's no good narrative or thematic reason for this excess, the sets and garments, I suppose, are intended as a counterpoint to the voluptuous sex scenes.  The movie is slow-moving, a rather laborious version of the old Mata Hari story -- a beautiful female spy seduces her victim, but, finally, can't bring herself to assassinate this man whom she apparently has come to actually love.  The black widow's failure has the most dire consequences:  she and her cell of resistance fighters are all killed.

Ang Lee's problem is to spin a two-hour plus movie from this slender anecdote.  He accomplishes this by a complex, flash-back structure.  We first meet the girl playing Mah-Jong with the wives of generals and military officials collaborating with the Japanese.  The Mah-Jong games, loving detailed in the film, are inscrutable -- they seem to symbolize the lurking and oppressive force of bad luck, the evil fate that will destroy the heroine.  A handsome, if sinister, military man, played by the go-to guy for explicit sex, Tony Leung (he appeared in Wong Kar-Wai's 1997 Happy Together in some memorable homosexual sex scenes), enters the room.  He and the girl lock eyes and, then, the film retreats four years, to Hong Kong in the very opening months of the World War.  The heroine is a student, taking courses in theater.  She wants to appear in Ibsen's Doll House but is, instead, urged to act in an anti-Japanese propaganda play.  The cadre of actors turns out to be resistance cell and they plot to murder the local general (Tony Leung) who is collaborating with the Japanese.  The girl turns out to be a formidable actress and has no difficulty exercising her wiles to ensnare the treasonous general.  But there's a problem -- she's a virgin and has to be deflowered before she can convincingly perform her role as an unhappy, adulterous young wife.  (This is method acting taken to an extreme.)  In these initial scenes, the girl is often shot in ways that are unflattering to her and that emphasize her naivety.  One of the actors gets drunk and has unsatisfactory and painful sex with her.  Properly prepared for her role as seductress, the girl lures the general to the place where he is to be killed, but he has qualms at the last moment and refuses to enter the building.  Later, a relative of one of the actors arrives and harangues the troupe about their nefarious schemes.  The actors stab him to death with broken shards of glass in a gory sequence that goes on for a long time and emphasizes the resistance fighter's clumsiness and inexperience with violence -- they talk fiercely but don't know what they are doing.  The film, then, flashes forward.  The girl is now in Shanghai.  She encounters the man who had sex with her three years earlier -- she seems to harbor some feelings for him.  Again, she is recruited and again assigned the task of seducing and killing the general who is now a chief torturer for his Japanese masters.  The film's lurid sex scenes follow, many of them quite brutal -- true to his profession, the general likes rough sex which, also, seems to please our heroine.  She is supposed to lure him to a jewelry store where he can be killed by the assassins.  At the last moment, she tells him to flee and everyone, except the villain, ends of up dead. 

A film of this sort is dependent the role of the leading lady.  As far as I can see, the heroine in the film is excellent (Tang Wei) -- running the gamut from girlish inexperience to the hardened insensitivity of a jaded courtesan.  (She was maybe too convincing in the sex scenes -- for a few years, the Communist regime in China banned her from its film industry; for instance, she was not allowed to appear in the Maoist drama, The Founding of the Party.)  Lust Caution is gloomy and invokes the 1941Hitchcock film Suspicion, a movie that is showing in Shanghai and that the heroine attends.  Indeed, the movies that the characters watch are integral to the film's themes -- the picture begins with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor in Waterloo Station (1940), a women's film involving selfless sacrifice, and features snippets of Suspicion intercut with ugly Japanese newsreels.  Lust Caution is an impressive picture and instills a vivid sense of tragedy in the viewer -- both tragedy and waste:  the girl seems to like the man who first had sex with her, but he never renews the relationship although, too late, he admits his love for her.  The sex that she experiences with the torturer is spectacular and multi-orgasmic, but she doesn't really like the man and, perhaps, even despises him a little -- therefore, it is puzzling that she spares his life at the climax, although I suppose this is out of respect for his sexual prowess.  It's not wholly clear what Ang Lee intends by this movie; he seems to be groping for some kind of comparison between sexual experiences -- naïve, clumsy first love and the depraved but technically accomplished experience with the jaded libertine.  But this Last Tango in Shanghai is more than a little opaque and the plot is to slender to support much interpretation.