Lust, Caution certainly didn’t deserve to win the Golden Lion at Venice (Jia Zhang-ke must be thankful Zhang Yimou wasn’t president of the jury last year), but nor does it deserve the lukewarm-to-cold critical reception it seems to be getting. This handsomely-mounted period espionage drama (set in wartime Shanghai, with the emphasis on the “drama” rather than the “espionage”) has all the virtues — and, of course, the limitations — of Ang Lee’s cinema: solid and slightly old-fashioned virtues of an attention to story and character and a clean and functional narrative style. Tang Wei does a fine job in the lead performance as the drama student at the centre of an assassination plot aimed at Tony Leung’s nasty collaborationist Mr Yee, but Leung’s acting is characteristically a little too one-note — we miss the emotion that Heath Ledger brought to Brokeback Mountain. Still, in the context of Chinese culture where vilification of the Japanese is par for the course (somewhat justified, I should add, given what they did in China and their reluctance to offer any adequate apology), there’s something courageous even today (as there was even more when Eileen Chang published her original novella) about the sympathetic shadings that are brought to Yee’s character and about the privileging of personal emotions over patriotic duty.
One of the strongest scenes in the film is when Wong Chia Chi (the Tang Wei) embarrasses and drives away her spymaster with the intimate details of how sex with Yee constitutes an assault on her body and her soul. It’s interesting that (once you’re past the first sex scene between Yee and Chia Chi — all spanking and bondage) we never get as deep a feeling of the psychological effects on Chia Chi from the sex scenes themselves. And to be honest I don’t think in the end the film really needs Lee’s tastefully-arranged displays of Tang and Leung’s body-part contortions.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
06 Oct 2007 1:51 PM | Submit Comment
