Lust, Caution (2007)
Or, a gifted director finally crystallizes the pet obsession of his fifteen year filmography and no one gives a shit. Ang Lee, the director of Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (no one mentions Hulk, though thematically it fits, which may have been the problem) has with, Lust, Caution returned to China with a story of espionage and passion that bares more than a passing resemblance, like several other recent thrillers, to Hitchcock’s Notorious. How refreshing it is then that a director actually EXPANDS on the Master’s thriller, and delivers a sharp, ripe film of devastating poignance.
We immediately know we’re in a more urgent Ang Lee movie as the camera sweeps over four ladies in the midst of a game of mahjong. The camera is quick and desperate, trying to keep up with the waves of unspoken things that hang in the room. A gentleman enters soon after, and the pregnant tension increases exponentially. You may accuse Lust, Caution of many things, but you won’t find it lacking in pregnant tension.
Which I think has been the problem for some people. You either get into these long slow burns, moments that are extended until the breaking point and then extended a few moments longer, or you don’t. When a director is this in his mojo, and has as much control over his medium as Lee does here, I say go for it. The film’s look, the sound, the mood, everything is lush and elegant.
And the story itself couldn’t be older. We open in Shangai 1944 on a beautiful young woman, Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang), a student who falls in with a mysterious political figure whom she’s meant to expose so that an amateur team of would be revolutionaries can assassinate him. That figure is Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), who is supposedly torturing information out of the resistance to Japan’s occupation of China. We flash back to the young girl, and to how she was recruited into the effort, and how she conspired to meet Mr. Yee.
The film is a remarkable work of empathy. Lee seduces us into buying into Chi’s view point. We see Shanghai as she would, a sensual place of mystery and danger. We also see Mr. Yee as she would, a charismatic, older shadow who promises (primarily sexual) experiences that have eluded her up to this point. The first hour or so is foreplay. We build. Build. Build. Mr. Yee takes Chi to a tailor to help him with a new suit. That becomes dinner. She invites him in for tea (where her party awaits to kill him) he looks her over…and declines. This is the ripe sexual danger of the old school thrillers, and Lee, at times a bit too cautious for his own good, is in peak form here. He plays with you, and…
…Chi’s little girl bubble bursts in a shocking, vicious anti-climax. Yee finally consumates both of their desires, and his brutish way with her will stick with you. Yee is reasserting his masculinity, the ground he feels he’s losing with Chi, but he’s also not sure of her. He suspects something, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that he, especially that first time, is trying to fuck her to death. And she, of course, finds that she likes it. Watch how Yee is with her after that first time, and how he turns an offering of a coat into a thinly veiled proclamation of whoredom. The other trysts, which earned the film an NC-17, are even more powerful. These two want each other so bad, are so confused with yearning and duplicity and all of the other things that are closing in on them from outside, that they want to fuck THROUGH one another, to find some new cleansing communication that can perhaps be a signal of escape.
Of course, Chi’s loyalties become confused. But do Yee’s? This is where Lee has saved his final black joke, taking it further than Hitchcock ever dared, painting Lee’s most convincing portait of society as toxic suppresser of our hidden values. Leung, a long time star and collaborator of Kar Wai Wong’s, is at his career best here. Mysterious. Pained. Animal. And just plain fucking movie star cool. Wei Tang, in her first picture, is even better in a more ambitious, demanding part. Something tells me that time will be kind to Lust, Caution and that a critical re-evaluation will take place. This movie is too accomplished and forceful.
★★★★
December 11th, 2007 at 9:24 am
This is a great example of a movie that didn’t quite hit me until I got home and started to process it. Not only that, I’d literally begun to write about it negatively before it clicked.
Perhaps I’m slow, perhaps it was a bad night, I don’t know. I rallied, but it was a weird moviegoing experience.
This is a great review Chuck and it’s a goddamn shame there weren’t more like it from the big critics. This one got the bum rush even worse than Assassination of Jesse James.
***this is all a little too spoilery****
The two scenes that stick in my mind all these weeks later: The sex scene you mentioned, not because of the sex but because of the unexpected animal brutality. In a way, I felt like he was testing her. Pushing her to see how far she would go and if she was for real. Plus he kind of liked it that way. For her part, I think she was a little surprised that she liked it too. The kicker for me though was the ending after he leaves and she rolls over and there’s an exhausted glow on her face that seems to be saying “Got him”. Up to that point I was thinking he’d turned the tables on her, but after that look I wasn’t so sure.
The other scene is the stabbing. I don’t know what exactly to say about it but: goddamn. Part of it was the enormous tension that had been building throughout the movie and part of it was the shocking horror of it. Brutal and personal and disturbing. Good stuff!
December 11th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Thank you very much Craig, glad to hear you enjoyed it. I was expecting much less based largely on what I had read, and was really surprised. This is Lee’s fullest film, his darkest and most uncompromising. And anyone who said it was bloodless or remote plain and simply did not see the same film I saw this weekend. Impossible. That murder scene you mentioned is a good example. Leung really is a badass too.