Lust, Caution (2007)
Tony Leung stars in the 2007 film "Lust, Caution" directed by Ang Lee.
A Cad and a Femme Fatale Simmer
“Lust, Caution” — a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” — is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director. Based on a short story about Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong, it was directed by Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-born, Hollywood-cultivated filmmaker who brought “Brokeback Mountain” to the screen. In that earlier romance, the love between two male sheepherders can scarcely speak its name, much less easily drop its jeans; by contrast, there’s little left to the imagination in “Lust, Caution,” other than the inspiration for Mr. Lee’s newfound flirtation with kink.
And flirtation is the word, despite the shoving and hitting, a few harsh lashes and geometric configurations that put me in mind of high school geometry more than it did the Kama Sutra. The Motion Picture Association of America, that tireless, cheerless band of Comstocks who regulate all things sexual and few things violent on behalf of the major studios, has saddled the film with an NC-17 rating — no one 17 and under admitted, even with an adult — because of “some explicit sexuality.” The horrors of female nudity (unshaven armpits!) and the vigorous pantomime of coitus apparently offended the sensibilities of the M.P.A.A., which routinely bestows R ratings to movies in which characters are tortured to death for kicks.
Me, I blushed at the grimly determined image of the Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, the great, grave, soulful heart of Wong Kar-wai films like “In the Mood for Love” and “2046,” bunching up the sheets as this new film’s resident villain and cad. As Mr. Yee, a Chinese official getting his hands bloody working for the Japanese occupiers, the actor slinks around the shadows like a specter of evil. (A fine Joan Chen flexes her red claws as his wife.) Yee is meant to be a bad, bad man, but mostly he comes across as a sad, sad man with flexible limbs and a taste for rough. He knocks rather than sweeps women off their feet, and his latest playmate, Mrs. Mak (Tang Wei), likes it that way.
Or maybe not. One of the film’s anemic conceits is that this playmate is really a drama club member, named Wong, swept up in a preposterous conspiracy against Yee. See, she’s playing a role. But her imitation of life has its limits, perhaps because the filmmakers have tried to squeeze an epic out of an exceedingly slender short story. However evocative, the transformation of this virginal creature — who looks most plausible (and all of 15) in long braids and no visible makeup — into a lethally minded femme fatale, a Mata Hari in a cheongsam, fails to convince. And it fails to convince at a ludicrous 158 minutes. (Mr. Lee’s adaptation of the Jane Austen novel “Sense and Sensibility” clocks in at a smooth 135.)
Like too many films that try to put a human face on history without really engaging with it, “Lust, Caution” feels at once overpadded and underdeveloped: it’s all production design and not enough content. The screenwriters James Schamus and Wang Hui Ling, who last collaborated on Mr. Lee’s lavish martial arts entertainment “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” have puffed up and sexed up Eileen Chang’s original story without adding any psychological depth or sociopolitical heft. (Oddly, the story line echoes Paul Verhoeven’s equally absurd, if livelier and more lurid, World War II-era romp, “Black Book.”) That’s particularly hard on Tang Wei, whose pretty bow mouth and gentle, hothouse manner feel terribly ill suited to a role that calls for cunning, for the emotional violence of sacrifice, betrayal, fanaticism, lust.
Her seasoned co-star fares better, even if he’s playing more of a conceit than a character. A poet of hurt, Mr. Leung suggests worlds of pain with his melancholic eyes — few actors convey desire as beautifully or with such reserve. (Unlike Jake Gyllenhaal, another performer whose dreamy gaze pulls you in as if into deep waters, you never catch Mr. Leung working his eyes, widening them for easy emotional effect.) In his best films, including “In the Mood for Love,” Mr. Leung doesn’t do much talking: he looks, he conquers. This makes him seem like a perfect match for Mr. Lee, who has a way of giving lyrical expression to mute desire. He can turn a sigh into a declaration of love, but he can’t turn minor soft-core shocks into poetry.
“Lust, Caution” has been rated NC-17 (No one 17 and under admitted). Think pay-cable soft-core pornography, not the video-store back room.
LUST, CAUTION
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Ang Lee; written (in Mandarin, with English subtitles) by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, based on the short story “Se, Jei” by Eileen Chang; director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Tim Squyres; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Pan Lai; produced by Bill Kong, Mr. Lee and Mr. Schamus; released by Focus Features. At the Lincoln Plaza, Broadway at 62nd Street. Running time: 158 minutes.
WITH: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Mr. Yee), Tang Wei (Wong Chia Chi/Mak Tai Tai), Joan Chen (Yee Tai Tai), Wang Leehom (Kuang Yu Min) and Anupam Kher (Jewelry Shop Manager).
Love as an Illusion: Beautiful to See, Impossible to Hold
Ang Lee directs Tang Wei on the set of “Lust, Caution.”
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Corrections Appended
IN “Brokeback Mountain,” the 2005 critical hit and cultural flashpoint that won Ang Lee an Academy Award for best director, love is a haunting, elusive ideal briefly attained but forever out of reach. Mr. Lee’s new movie, “Lust, Caution,” which will have its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival this week, is also a tragic melodrama, one in which the lovers are up against forces beyond their control, but it takes a harsher view of romance. This time love is a performance, a trap or, cruelest of all, an illusion.
“ ‘Brokeback’ is about a lost paradise, an Eden,” Mr. Lee said this month, taking a break from a final sound-mixing session in Manhattan. “But this one — it’s down in the cave, a scary place. It’s more like hell.”
Based on a short story by the popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang, “Lust, Caution” is set in the early 1940s during the Sino-Japanese war, mostly in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The heroine, Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), belongs to a university drama troupe plotting to assassinate a collaborator named Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Assigned to seduce the target, an official in the puppet government, she falls into a desperately physical affair, driven (as the title suggests) by both passion and suspicion. The cast also includes Joan Chen as the grasping, gossipy Mrs. Yee, and Wang Lee-hom, the American-born Asian pop star, as the student ringleader. (The film, which will also be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival next month, is set for release on Sept. 28 by Focus Features.)
Mr. Lee said that when he first read Chang’s story, which she started writing in the ’50s then obsessively revised and eventually published in 1979, it struck him in much the same way as the Annie Proulx story that was the basis for “Brokeback Mountain.” “At first I thought there’s no way I can make it a movie,” he said. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. “There’s a point where I feel this is my story. It becomes a mission.”
Like Mr. Lee, 52, who was born in Taiwan but has lived and worked in the United States since the ’80s, Chang had a foot in two worlds. Her celebrated early stories and novellas, written in the ’40s, evoked the heady, glamorous fusion of East and West, old and new, that characterized Shanghai before the Communist takeover.
After the 1949 revolution she fled to Hong Kong and then to America, where she continued to write and translate but became ever more reclusive, even as her fame grew throughout the Chinese diaspora. She died in Los Angeles in 1995. Her work has been adapted for the screen by the Hong Kong directors Stanley Kwan (“Red Rose, White Rose”) and Ann Hui (“Love in a Fallen City”).
For Mr. Lee, an astute observer of the warping power of sexual desire and repression (not just in “Brokeback Mountain,” but also in films as disparate as “The Ice Storm,” “The Wedding Banquet” and “Sense and Sensibility”), the allure of “Lust, Caution” lies in the irreducible mystery of its love story, which culminates in a seemingly rash and irrational act. “It’s complex and hard to pin down,” he said. “Maybe it can’t be pinned down.”
To expand Chang’s slender story to a feature-length script (the film, which is in Mandarin, runs two and a half hours), Mr. Lee worked first with Wang Hui-Ling, a co-writer on some of his Chinese-language films, including “Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994) and the martial-arts fantasy “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”James Schamus, CEO of Focus Features as well as the producer of all of Mr. Lee’s films and the writer or co-writer on most of them. Mr. Schamus’s lack of familiarity with Chang’s work was an advantage. (2000). He then turned to
“I didn’t have the innate reverence that I think Chinese readers do,” he said. “I didn’t have to worry too much about suggesting significant changes.”
A grand production on a modest budget of under $15 million, “Lust, Caution” was shot over four months in Hong Kong, Malaysia (standing in for old Hong Kong) and Shanghai. The most ambitious undertaking was a full-scale re-creation, built in only three months on a Shanghai soundstage, of a section of Nanking Road, the city’s commercial thoroughfare, complete with more than 100 storefronts. But above all it was the raw intensity of the intimate scenes that made for a grueling shoot. “We didn’t have to stick our stars 60 feet in the air above a bamboo forest,” Mr. Schamus said, referring to the wire-work ballet of “Crouching Tiger,” “so in that sense it was easier. But especially for Ang this was a much more difficult film. It took him to a place that was really emotional and extreme.”
Mr. Lee’s “Lust, Caution” makes overt the first part of its title, which Chang only hinted at in her lush, stylized prose. “It was very brave of her to fit this story of a woman’s sexual pleasure into a story of war, something so patriarchal and macho,” Mr. Lee said. “How she put that subject matter in this huge canvas — it’s a little drop but the ripple is tremendous.” He said he felt no obligation to retain the relative discretion of the writing: “In Chinese literature the art is the hiding. But movies are another animal. It’s a graphic tool.”
Accordingly, his film features a few notably revealing and acrobatic sex scenes. (A less explicit cut is being prepared for a possible Chinese release.) These were shot over 11 days on a closed set, with only the main camera and sound personnel present. Leaving room to improvise, Mr. Lee talked through the physical and emotional content of each scene with Mr. Leung (the Hong Kong star best known here for his roles in Wong Kar-wai’s films) and Ms. Tang (who had never before acted in a film). “Ang’s a unique director because he trained to be an actor,” Mr. Leung said by e-mail from China, where he is shooting a film with John Woo. “He’s very quick and intuitive and is always offering his actors something new to work off of.”
The process was harrowing. “We could only shoot for half the day because we’d be exhausted,” Mr. Lee said. “I almost went insane.” But he was convinced of the necessity of the sex scenes. “They’re like the fight sequences in ‘Crouching Tiger,’ ” he said. “It’s life and death. It’s where they really show their character.” He added, “And it’s part of the plot, since it’s all about acting, levels of acting. You’re performing when you have sex.” (At press time “Lust, Caution” had not yet received a rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, but both Mr. Lee and Mr. Schamus said they were expecting an NC-17.)
“Lust, Caution” conjures not just ’40s Shanghai but ’40s Hollywood, summoning the ghosts of film noirs and wartime romantic melodramas. The shadow of Alfred Hitchcock looms large. A poster of “Suspicion” — which Mr. Lee noted was “the biggest hit of 1942 in Shanghai” — is glimpsed at one point. “Notorious,” with its intricate entangling of perverse love and espionage business, is the obvious influence (possibly even for Chang, an occasional film critic who wrote screenplays for Hong Kong’s Cathay Studios in the ’50s and ’60s). Mr. Lee cites another touchstone: Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 “Dishonored,” starring Marlene Dietrich as an Austrian secret agent spying on the Russians.
For Mr. Lee, whose parents were exiles from mainland China, “Lust, Caution” resonates on a political level. “It’s about occupying and being occupied,” he said. “The peril here is falling in love with your occupier.” But he was also drawn to the poignant notion that the story, though inspired by an actual assassination plot in the 1930s, incorporated elements of Chang’s own life: a university education in Hong Kong interrupted by war, and a doomed romance with an older man publicly known as a traitor. Chang’s first husband, the writer Hu Lancheng, briefly served in the puppet government and was an inveterate philanderer.
“It was hard for me to live in Eileen Chang’s world,” Mr. Lee said. “There are days I hated her for it. It’s so sad, so tragic. But you realize there’s a shortage of love in her life: romantic love, family love.” He added, “This is the story of what killed love for her.”
Correction: September 2, 2007
An article last Sunday about Ang Lee’s film “Lust, Caution” gave an outdated title for James Schamus of Focus Features, which is releasing the movie. Mr. Schamus is the chief executive officer of the studio — not co-president, a post he departed last year.
Correction: September 9, 2007
An article on Aug. 26 about Ang Lee’s film “Lust, Caution” included an incorrect spelling from the publicist for the name of the character played by Tang Wei. The character is Chia-Chih, not Chia Chi.
Correction: September 30, 2007
An article on Aug. 26 about the film “Lust, Caution” omitted part of the name of a character portrayed by Tang Wei, and both an article on Sept. 2 and a correction that day that relied on outdated publicity materials also misstated the character’s name. It is Wong Chia Chi, not Chia Chi, Wang Chia-Chih or Chia-Chih. ------------------------------------------------------------