Lust, Caution

[Mr. Rover]

I enjoyed it, but the neckties were too thick to be from the 30s/40s. Wang Leehom stole my haircut, too...

....Hardly the focalpoint of the film, though.


Shien, who runs Dances of Vice, and I were supposed to get dressed up to see it, but I ended up seeing it with a film student friend. I enjoyed it, costumes and acting and plot and all, but some people here may be turned off by the amount of sex in it.
Tony Leung's mandarin is very noticeably worse than the rest of the cast, as he is from Hong Kong, and Wang Leehom's greenness is a bit evident (he basically has his "stern face" on for the whole film, although he does have some more tender moments in the beginning).With the costumes (chipao/cheongsam for the women and suits for the men) it's easy to compare the film to "In The Mood For Love", Wang Kar-Wai's masterpiece starring Tony Leung, but aside from costume and possibly pacing, these two films are very different animals. I prefer Wang Kar-Wai's film for its subtle emotional restraint, but Ang Lee captures the era and mood very well in this beautifully shot film, too.

 

[PADDY]

A tragic love story in war torn Shanghai...(worth a look!!)

The film begins in the Shanghai of 1942, a city in which many local men and women have chosen to collaborate with the occupying Japanese forces rather than fight them. An exception is Mak Tai-Tai (Wei Tang, who is just drop dead gorgeous! by the by), the name assumed by a demure and apparently respectable college student called Wong Chia Chi. A few years earlier she had fallen under the influence of another student, the charismatic radical Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom, who really should be played by our own Ray!!! you'd be great), and, inspired also by her performance in a patriotic play in which she reduces audiences to tears (me included, as I sat in the cinema audience!!), she agrees to be a femme fatale and try to seduce and help assassinate leading Chinese government collaborator Yee (Tony Leung - who I kept hoping would turn out to be a good guy, but sadly...no can do[huh] ).

All of this, plus her father's escape to England and the time she spent with other resistance cell members calculating how best to ensnare the cold and apparently invulnerable Yee, is recounted during a slow and very long flashback at the start of the film. But stick with it as it all unfolds back on itself!!!

Lee, who adapted a short story by Eileen Chang, is particularly good at evoking the coltish naivety of the young rebels: they talk in furious certainties, but are barely sexual beings, requiring one of their more clumsy-looking members to deflower Mak of her virginity (as part of her guise as a 'married' woman) and give her the opportunity to learn how to use her body as a weapon of war. As we find out during the movie, the psychological warfare by both parties is played out both between the sheets of the bed, the sheets of their minds and ultimately the sheets of the film script.

Much more stark is the scene in which they are driven to stab another collaborator who has discovered their deceptions. They take turns to hack away, penetrating him with almost the same gauche uncertainty as the fellow who took Mak's virginity, in a clumsy yet necessary frenzy. Each of them is mortified at the slowness of death and its messy viscerality. The gulf between the theory and the black-and-white clarity of "revolutionary violence" anticipates what happens when Mak manages to ensnare Yee.

The sex scenes between the pair of them are about as graphic as can be imagined outside explicitly porn-inspired films such as Shortbus. The couple heave and slap and adopt shapes and positions that would startle the compilers of the Kama Sutra. It's rightly erotic, and for me is both necessaryl, beautiful and embodies the double edged sword of their relationship bending and entwining between warmth, love, lust and a cold detachment (which is echoed in their relationship) but, just as Michael Winterbottom sought to do in 9 Songs, the sex embodies and mirrors the complex, shifting and ambiguous dynamics of their relationship.

The first time they sleep together, Yee is so violent it seems like rape, as he dominates his prey. We wonder: has he rumbled her true identity and is now punishing her? Is this the repressed, vicious carnality that underlies his official demeanour? We also wonder: will she cry out and confess? Is she going to die? Is she actually enjoying it? It's rare that a sex scene at the movies can sustain responses more conflicting and interesting than: was it a turn-on? This works on so many levels and taps into so many of our own emotions and morals as voyeurs of this film.

As such, for me it fully vindicated Lee's genteel pacing, and his decision to remake a 1940s-style espionage thriller without the lurid pulpiness of, say, Paul Verhoeven's recent Black Book, set in Holland during the German occupation, and in my (Paddy's) mind, it is so much more successful.

In fact, helped by terrific performances from Wei Tang and from Leung, who imparts a melancholic longing to offset his character's savagery and paranoia, the film almost becomes a 'tragic' love story that we have no doubt will all end in tears!![huh] . It's a pleasure to be able to luxuriate in the quietly sensual, mah-jong-playing laziness of upper-crust Shanghai. A pleasure to watch a film as visually stylish as it is psychologically demanding. I wish it had been twice as long. And because of the luxury and style of the settings and trappings, it makes the brutality of some of the love making, the assassinations and the final ending all the more cold and graphic.

"I loved it...!!!" (if you hadn't guessed already ).

 

[Alan Eardley]

Shouldn't it be titled, ''Caution: Lust!' for people of delicate sensibilities?

Alan

 

[jake_fink]

From Time Out Magazine, London.

There’s a superb and important early scene in Ang Lee’s absorbing spy romance, set on a stylised (studio-shot) Hong Kong tram in 1939, as a young troupe of Chinese actors board, flushed with the rousing success of that night’s patriotic play. (The Japanese have already occupied their homeland, British-run Hong Kong is soon to fall.) The exhilarated lead character Wong Chia Chi (a remarkable, film-dominating debut performance by newcomer Wei Tang) thrusts her head out the window to taste the rain, as if to make physical and personal the night’s small triumph. You see in that moment how the innocent young actress may be persuaded, in patriotic duty, to adopt an alias, spy on and seduce, in order to kill Tony Leung’s collaborationist chief of police.

You could call Lee’s Chinese-language version of Eileen Chang’s novella a revisionist wartime thriller. Its sub-Brechtian moments are muted, but it is more than happy to pay self-conscious attention to the period setting, design and clothes to highlight, in echo of David Hare’s ‘Plenty’, the seductive role of dress as disguise and mask. Like Hare (with his OAS volunteer, Kate Nelligan), Lee is interested in applying an emotional and psychological realism to his heroine’s incredible bravery. It seems, in wartime, some are able to assume grave responsibilties, but – as Lee’s film quietly and provocatively suggests – the actions of those that do make mockery of conventional, sex-based, notions of what constitutes courage, honour, love or even patriotism itself. In this sense, the real battlefield, the genuine theatre of truth, in ‘Lust, Caution’ is the bed – the sex – in the arranged flat three years later in Shanghai, something of a last tango wherein Leung’s previously almost obsequiously mannered ‘traitor’ shows his true colours, and Miss Wong, under her alias Mrs Mak, is transformed by the ever-present knowledge that discovery is death. It’s not a companionable film – Lee’s directorial discipline, objectivity and lack of expressionist touch in the use of either Rodrigo Prieto’s camerawork or Alexandre Desplat’s score can push the viewer close to outsider-dom or voyeurism – but its dark romanticism lingers in the mind.

Gosh. That's clunky. Who wrote that?

 

[Story]

Financial Times review

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5e875028-bb30-11dc-9fbc-0000779fd2ac.html

It wasn't a dream, but it felt like one. I was on an unknown yet eerily familiar street in a foreign land. Around me stood an army of motionless human beings, dressed as if for the 1930s, disposed in artfully random positions and casting their shadows as if waiting for Giorgio de Chirico to paint them. I had reached this twilight zone through the misty frontiers of my own unconscious. Or that's the dream-analogy I took from my morning taxi ride through the thick, thick smog of China's largest city.

 

[scotrace]

Just saw this on DVD last night - a great film with a surprise (for me) ending. Sets, costumes, hair, all great. I want those guy's haircuts.

 

[Hondo]

I'd be happy with just hair lol
Seriously agree sets, costumes were great,
I need to see again and hair cuts.

Just saw this on DVD last night - a great film with a surprise (for me) ending. Sets, costumes, hair, all great. I want those guy's haircuts.

 

[PADDY]

UK Only - see the film on DvD

Just seen it at Asda (supermarket) being sold off for £5..!! well worth it, as some of the clothes are just beautiful, and not a bad plot either.

 

[carter]

This looks like one to see. The period details look terrific. I'll be looking for it.

 

[poetman]

I just rented this. The reviews seem encouraging. It looks good. I'll post after I watch it.

 

[poetman]

I enjoyed it, but the neckties were too thick to be from the 30s/40s. Wang Leehom stole my haircut, too...

....Hardly the focalpoint of the film, though.


Shien, who runs Dances of Vice, and I were supposed to get dressed up to see it, but I ended up seeing it with a film student friend. I enjoyed it, costumes and acting and plot and all, but some people here may be turned off by the amount of sex in it.
Tony Leung's mandarin is very noticeably worse than the rest of the cast, as he is from Hong Kong, and Wang Leehom's greenness is a bit evident (he basically has his "stern face" on for the whole film, although he does have some more tender moments in the beginning).With the costumes (chipao/cheongsam for the women and suits for the men) it's easy to compare the film to "In The Mood For Love", Wang Kar-Wai's masterpiece starring Tony Leung, but aside from costume and possibly pacing, these two films are very different animals. I prefer Wang Kar-Wai's film for its subtle emotional restraint, but Ang Lee captures the era and mood very well in this beautifully shot film, too.

How did you like "In the Mood for Love?" I read or saw something about some time ago. Is it worth renting?

 

[Edward]

Bingo. A lot of foreign language films to be released in the US have trailers often created with no dialogue cause it can be a 'turn off' to people. Pan's Labyrinth comes to mind. Which I consider funny, cause the people who would watch that film dont care/ would realize its forign language film and there will be subtitles. :eusa_doh:
LD

True, though I suppose I can inderstand them avoiding anything which would deter any potential "swing voters." I think they did the same thing with Nightwatch - actually, the Region 2 DVD release includes a second version of the film which is dubbed into English (and very well - had I not known, I'm not ure whether I would have noticed especially quickly). It never ceases to disappoint me the way so much of the mainstream cinema audience will simply turn up its nose at anything different - and it goes beyond subtitles. Audiences complained they disliked late 90s Bob Koskins vehicle 24 7 because it was shot in black and white. The marketing, at least here in the UK, for Burton's Sweeney Todd avoided overly mentioning that it was a musical - and many expressed irritation, seemingly feeling that they had been tricked into watching a musical (impliedly an inferior type of film). [huh]

 

[poetman]

It was a pretty good film. Of course, the costumes and set really stole the show. The plot was good enough. The male and female leads were wonderful, and the ending was surprising and thrilling! A good one.