Review of Lust, Caution (2007) by Paul Z — 12 Jun 2009

Ang Lee has always had an instinct for characterization. He may not always penetrate to the core of many of his characters; he certainly doesn't here. But he gives us some of the most well-defined shells of personalities that can be found in the majority of films. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai has the perfect dispositional approach for a character like Mr. Yee, a Japanese collaborationist whose inner life we may have never known anyway. He is the sort whose truest layers can be assumed unknown by anyone close to him, and we read that from the external text we are given. But the story as a whole is a serpentine thicket of dual-ended motivations, minds exploding with indecision and conflicted, disagreeable animal lust, all but the last of which can only be emotionally detected. The central character, a woman played by the steamily, submissively sexy Tang Wei, a sort of babe in the woods to such an intensely divided society in which the story is set that surrounds her. Whether intentionally or not, Lee's aesthetic choices distinctly feel as if to reflect her defensive external persona throughout the film, always remaining on the superficial, almost meaningless scenic beauty, fashion and etiquette of the world around her and not even setting direct sight or attention on the surrounding mayhem of the time, except in one scene in which our heroine has no choice but to deal with it like the rest. Only one thing can be for sure: If given any single smidgen of evidence of any kind that would show one or the other reason to belief they are dangerous enemies, there would be not a single nanosecond of hesitation to react. Believe me, you'll see.

We open with a strikingly well-filmed Mah-Jongg game. The dialogue is tight, and the camera implicates the players focused on all the game's details no matter what they talk about, foreshadowing the very kind of mental stalemate that permeates the center of the plot's relationships. It's taking place in the home of Mr. Yee, played by the powerful Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, whose wife, Lost's Joan Chen, is hosting the get-together. From the beginning of their coming from Shanghai, he has moved up in the collaborationist government, and his Tony Leung disposition is utilized presumably as an intimidation tactic for inquisitions and tortures, and is rewarded smug social standing and thus such lower- class rareties as nylon stockings, cigarettes, not to mention diamonds. When Mr. Yee comes home in the middle of the game, he instigates an intuitive exchange of looks with Mrs. Mak, the gently temperate actress Tang Wei, who first rubbed shoulders with the clique in Shanghai.

It's logically evident to us there's something clandestine and even illicit between them. But who is this socially embroidered Mrs. Mak, who cruises in a hired car but whose husband is perpetually away on business? We don't quite know what's going on till half an hour in. And then we still don't know, but we have a better external idea. But what is internal is kept obscure.

We do not see Mr. Yee at work, torturing his cultural kin, but Leung shades the man's capacity for violence and uses Mrs. Mak as an object for violent release in bed with her. Then come the scenes that got the film caught by the NC-17 monster. They are not tangibly hard core in detail, but afford so many puzzling, at times perhaps unaccountable gymnastic sexual positions that the MPAA's pact of silence upon the presentation of "thrusting" is in effect from the first shot.

When their sex parallels affectionately with violence, the inherence of their chemistry goes through a kind of agreed-upon metamorphosis. No viewer can be marksman enough to say for certain that Mrs. Mak likes his proclivities for sadism and tying her up with their low- class rareties, but they develop a formidable relationship that, for both of them, expands their respective lives, which each believes is unknown to the other, which may or may not be true. And it is that tug of war, between individual infatuation and social peril, that gives the movie its significance.

Mr. Yee and Mrs. Mak are just as transgressive as the lovers in Ang Lee's previous film Brokeback Mountain, just as entrenched in a kind of sex that is vilified by their insulated social environments. The actuality of the sex itself is Lee's focus here, and he's too honorable to neuter his vision under the intimidation of the MPAA's puritan strait-jacket. His incidental instants of full frontal nudity defy the unnatural fundament of most movie sex scenes in which the lovers, together or by themselves, strategically hide their gonads from sight. Yet, the scenes are not edited for sexiness exploitation, it must be noted, but are handled in the context of their intellectual message.