WWII espionage thriller Lust, Caution cracks beneath its unconvincing story

The WWII espionage thriller Lust, Caution is Ang Lee’s followup to Brokeback Mountain, and at first they don’t seem to have anything in common. The films strike opposite tones—where the 2005 film spilled over with sentiment (and featured the demurest suggestion of butt sex ever set to celluloid), Lust, Caution is bloodshot and sadistic (this is one NC-17 rating I have no quarrel with). But they both mess with genre conventions for political ends. Brokeback Mountain’s gay humanism was achieved by combining the signifiers of a Western with the mechanics of a melodrama; Lust, Caution unites a perverse coming-of-age story with a spy thriller, and throws in a little film noir for good measure. Yet while the Western and the melodrama complemented one another (the one stereotypically masculine, the other conventionally feminine), the coming-of-age story and the thriller fit awkwardly. It seems a little silly to want to know everything about the psychology of a femme fatale.

Following a pitch-perfect prelude set in 1940s Shanghai, where the clink of lacquered nails against mahjong tiles can’t drown out the hum of jealousy in a circle of privileged wives, the narrative scoots back to the late thirties. One of the wives (Tang Wei)—now a college coed with a half-ponytail and the name Wong Chia Chi—is being persuaded to audition for a patriotic play. The girl falls in love first with acting and the rush of heartfelt applause, and only then with political action against China’s Japanese occupiers.

Encouraged by her drama group friends, the girl, now calling herself Mak Tai Tai, insinuates herself into the social circle of a collaborator (Tony Leung, brilliant) and his wife (Joan Chen, underused), intending to seduce the traitor so he can be isolated from his bodyguards and assassinated. Her lust for performance is absolute: The student idealist disappears completely beneath the powdered skin of the society lady she’s imitating. More annoyingly, Tang the actor is careful not to let us see any cracks or communication between the two layers of character (until the script, belatedly and all at once, demands it). The press notes reveal the extent of the problem. Asked how she dealt with “playing a character who herself is playing a role for much of the movie,” Tang responds: “It was very complicated. So I would not think about Wong Chia Chi but about Mak Tai Tai. I could not think, ‘I am Wong Chia Chi as Mak Tai Tai,’ I was just thinking ‘I am Mak Tai Tai.’” We’ve seen Wong Chia Chi grow up and get herself into this mess, but she remains a total cipher.

So despite Ang Lee’s insistence that Lust, Caution is told “from a woman’s point of view,” it’s hard to understand her point of view—how Wong Chia Chi could fall in love with a man she’d prefer to murder than fuck, a man who basically rapes her the first time they have sex. The suggestion that she likes it rough is painfully insufficient; her weakness for pink diamonds is just insulting. The individual parts of the film—coming-of-age story, mahjong jousts, cuts to fierce-looking German Shepherds at inappropriate moments, Tang Wei’s two separate performances—are often quite interesting. And the film’s basic outline isn’t implausible. But, like its elegantly contorted sex scenes, it’s unconvincing on screen.

LUST, CAUTION DIR. ANG LEE | RATED NC-17 | AT SELECT THEATERS

Tags: ang lee, caution, lust