- Title: Lust, Caution
- IMDb: link
One of my favorites from the extremely strong slate of films released in 2007, director Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution earned praise winning Lee his second Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival but also backlash for the film’s explicit sex scenes causing it to be released in America under a NC-17 rating. Loosely inspired by an attempt to kill a Japanese collaborator during WWII, Tang Wei stars as the most naive member of a group of radicalized college students who plan to kill a collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) set in power by the Japanese occupation in China.
At 158-miinutes, Lust, Caution isn’t a film I return to often but am always impressed with when I do. Although there are other characters of various importance, the film really boils down to Wei and Leung. Tang Wei is terrific here in a star-making role (despite getting blackballed in China for two years) and Leung is great as the hard-edged would-be victim who, even in her rough treatment of her, Wei’s character comes to care for.
Lust, Caution is incredibly well shot and staged by Ang Lee, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and production and costume designer Pan Lai bringing the time-period drama to life. While I think some of the early scenes of Wong Chia Chi (Wei) being part of the drama troop prior to its radicalization could be trimmed for time, I wouldn’t touch a frame of the rest of the film once our plot begins.
Playing with themes of sexuality and power, and the connections between pain and pleasure, the film focuses on Wong inserting herself into the life of Lee (Leung) in Hong Kong under the false identity of Mrs. Mak. Lee’s sexual interest in the the alluring Mrs. Mak causes the group to set up a honey trap which results in a grizzly murder (just not the one they had planned). Wong agrees to sacrifice her virginity for the cause, sleeping repeatedly with another member of the resistance, and learning the skills needed to try and entrap Lee.
While that sacrifice was initially for naught, fleeing the scene following the murder, three years later, in Shanghai, Wong would assume the identity of Mrs. Mak once more for the Chinese resistance and begin an affair with Lee. The relationship in the bedroom begins in what only can be described as the rape of Mrs. Mak by Lee, but undeterred, and willing to put the skills learned in her sexual awakening to use, a torrid (and, yes, visually explicit) affair begins which will eventually lead Mrs. Mak and Lee to develop feelings of more than lust for each other and put Wong in an impossible situation when the time comes to take Lee down.
Although there is an R-rated version of the film exists (released mostly for the American home video market), I would suggest seeking out the original whenever possible (at least for those not put off by the sexual nature of the film). Even while fighting the censorship imposed, both in China and abroad, dramatically limiting where the film could be released, Lust, Caution was still managed to make back more than four-times its estimated $15 million budget pulling in $67 million worldwide. A success in every sense of the word, I would rank it near the top movies of Lee’s career.
