Lust, Caution

Synopsis: During WWII when Hong Kong is occupied by the Japanese, a naïve young college student, Wang Chia Chi (Tang Wei) joins a patriotic theatre troupe. This leads to her become the mistress of a highly placed collaborator Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) as part of a plot to assassinate him.

As one would expect, Ang Lee’s follow-up to Brokeback Mountain (2005) is a superbly cinematic effort. With a flawless production design, strong performances from the two leads, veteran screen heart-throb, Tony Leung, and, in an outstanding debut, Tang Wei, together with the director’s typically graceful handling of the narrative the film is unquestionably A-grade quality. It is also a film that will have many people, whilst acknowledging the quality, wishing it would move at least a little faster than it does.

Stylistically, one cannot help but recall the films of Wong Kar-Wai, notably In The Mood For Love (2000) which also starred Leung. Both films are culturally-specific, slow-burn, extra-marital romances but whereas Wong's played out in the claustrophobic confines of everyday life in Hong Kong of the 1960s, Lee’s is a war-time espionage thriller of sorts. Definitely of sorts, for very little that is thrilling happens until close to the film’s end by which time one has long wondered why is it so difficult for Ms Wong and her passle of amateur resistance fighters to bump off Mr Lee, particularly given the evident skill they have in mounting an elaborate subterfuge in order to ingratiate themselves into his world.

The real point of the story, adapted from one by popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang by Wang Hui-Ling and James Schamus, who have both regularly worked with Lee, is not, however, how to knock him off but for he and Ms Wong to fall into libidinally-fervid love. Which, of course, they do and which because of its torrid physical nature (of which we get a good eye-full) has earned the film an R rating. This is the core of the film and it is impressively handled with Leung, a master of suppressed sexual tensility and Tang Wei his perfectly-poised prey and vice versa. The heart of the film is given to watching their cat-and-mouse game as they play for something that is finally found in their physical couplings.

The problem with the film, however, is that we never find out what this something is. Why is Chia Chi prepared to sacrifice so much for someone she knows nothing of bar that he is a collaborator and killer-by-proxy? Why is Mr Yee a (typically nihilistic) collaborator and what does he see in Chia Chi? Had a little more effort been spent on these questions and getting the characters to explore them, the title of the film might have meant more than a seemingly glib warning about the havoc that sexual desire can cause with the best laid plans.

 

 

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