Shanghai Charade
Ang Lee turns up the heat in 'Lust, Caution'
By Andy Klein
It may be ironic that Ang Lee - who holds the distinction of being both one of America's finest directors and one of Taiwan's finest directors - had his big commercial breakthrough Stateside with his last Chinese-language film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). That martial arts epic remains far and away the most successful foreign-language release of all time in America's notoriously subtitle-resistant culture.
It's an additional irony that the only Lee film to gross more than Crouching Tiger was The Hulk, frequently regarded as his biggest commercial disappointment. If the latter seems contradictory, remember that this 2003 release cost almost twice as much as Lee's seven previous films put together.
In any case, following the hugely acclaimed Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lee returns to the Chinese side of his roots with Lust, Caution, a romantic melodrama set in Shanghai and Hong Kong during World War II. And, if Brokeback Mountain smashed some iconic sexual stereotypes, Lust, Caution also takes chances with some content explicit enough to have earned it an uncontested NC-17 rating.
The film opens with beautiful Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei) excusing herself from a mahjong game at the home of her friend Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen). She heads to a Western café where she makes a mysterious phone call. As she gazes out the window of the bistro, her ruminations about to throw us into a flashback, the foreground is dominated by her coffee cup, which has a bit of the oversize look of the grotesquely disproportionate prop cup Alfred Hitchcock supplied Ingrid Bergman's character in Notorious (which is not accidental).
The flashback - which occupies two hours of the movie's remaining 145 minutes - takes us back to 1938: We learn that Wong Chia Chi (Mak Tai Tai's real name) is a shy student in Hong Kong, who becomes part of a university theater troupe. When the group's patriotic play rouses the audience, the actors are flush with the power of drama to effect political change. And, when one of them runs into an old acquaintance (Chin Kar-Lok), who is now working for Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), a powerful collaborator, they decide to create a real-life drama - in the form of a political assasination.
In order to gain entry into the Yee household, Auyang Ling Wen (Johnson Yuen) pretends to be Mr. Mak, an importer; and our heroine plays the part of his wife, Tai Tai. The so-called Mak Tai Tai grows close to Yee Tai Tai - "Tai Tai" appears to be the Mandarin equivalent of "little missus" or thereabouts - even as obvious signs of attraction develop between her and Mr. Yee himself.
Mr. Yee is constantly surrounded by bodyguards, and the would-be assassins immediately realize that a liaison between him and Mak Tai Tai is by far their best chance at finding him unguarded. But Chia Chi - although playing the part of a married woman - is a virgin, so she has to undergo a crash course in sex, courtesy of the only one of the men in the group with any experience.
But the plan has to be scuttled when Mr. Yee is sent out of the country. Chia Chi drops her false identity and goes back to Shanghai, where she returns to the unassuming life of her pre-political days. Years pass before she learns that the Yees are now in Shanghai as well, and the resistance taps her to reassume the mantle of Mak Tai Tai and pick up where she left off.
All of which means that it's a long tease - an hour and a half - before the first sex scene, which is a doozy and presumably the main reason for the NC-17 rating. Without going into details, let's just say that it will stun longtime fans of Leung and possibly even those unfamiliar with his work. (The two remaining sex sequences are intense but not nearly as shocking.)
If Crouching Tiger was Lee's updating/reworking of the martial arts films of his youth, Lust, Caution serves an analogous function for Chinese cinema's wartime romantic melodrama. Like several of these films, it's adapted from a novella by Eileen Chang, a writer whose career was split between the U.S. and China as much as Lee's, though apparently far less happily. Chang died in Los Angeles in 1995 at the age of 75, having lived nearly all of her final 40 years here, writing novels in both English and Chinese. She had herself fallen in love with a man regarded as a collaborator, and the experience was the basis for Lust, Caution, informing other works as well. (Yim Ho's beautiful 1990 Hong Kong film Red Dust was clearly inspired by Chang's life and covers similar turf.) After the death of her second husband, screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher, who was 30 years her senior, she lived a largely reclusive existence.
If Lust, Caution is every inch a Chinese film, it also reflects the influence of Hollywood. Chang wrote film criticism and several screenplays, and her heroine is a movie buff. The coffee cup is not the only Hitchcock reference. The plot is also reminiscent of Notorious, both of whose stars appear in clips we watch along with Chia Chi - Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo, and Cary Grant in Penny Serenade. (We also see a poster for Grant in Hitchcock's Suspicion.) At one point, Mr. Yee dismissively says, "Movies are for people with time to kill" with the unspoken corollary that he's only got time to kill people.
Tang Wei, in her first film, is in nearly every scene, holding her own with Leung, Chen, and several other old pros. For Leung devotees, the movie is problematic. Besides being a tremendous actor, Leung is a movie star whose stock-in-trade is charm. The more he disappears in his role, the more fans may wish it were anyone else in the part. That is, his character starts out incredibly guarded and inexpressive; when he finally opens up, he's a right bastard. By the very end, we may feel some sympathy for his inner conflicts, but the casting is nonetheless jarring. (Leung's heroic character in John Woo's Hard Boiled was initially supposed to be a crazed killer before costar Chow Yun-Fat wisely convinced Woo to change it.)
Lee, as always, is a master of character nuance, but Lust, Caution may prove tougher sledding for audiences than his previous work. Despite its suspense aspects, its pacing is more like Brokeback Mountain than Crouching Tiger, but sustained for greater length. There is not a single moment to fault: the whole is beautifully mounted, acted, and directed. But not everyone is likely to fall under its romantic spell.
Published: 10/04/2007
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