Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(03/26/08)

Lust, Caution feels like it takes place in an elegant salon down the hall from the torture chamber, down the street from World War II, viewed from the perspective of occupied Shanghai. The salon's mahjong-playing denizens are the wealthy wives of the Chinese collaborators who run the country for its Japanese conquerors. One of the husbands runs the torture chamber. One of the wives is not a wife at all, but a spy for the Chinese resistance, assigned to seduce the torture master and set him up for assassination.

The enigmatic title derives from two Chinese characters. Unaware of their multiple meanings and the significance of their juxtaposition, we can only crudely render it into something like Beware Desire, which suggests a much more lurid, melodramatic production than Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain) has created. Here, he takes a finely detailed formalist approach, resulting in a slow-paced film of reserve and refinement shaped by subtle gestures and fleeting glances, punctuated by one episode of shocking amateur violence and a few bouts of rough, explicit sex. The torture is all off screen and the sex is only in proper proportion, given how it drives the story, yet the film has acquired a notorious reputation due to Lee refusing to cut it to get an R rating. Apparently it violates the MPAA's stricture against "thrusting," especially in multiple positions requiring extreme flexibility.

We meet our glamorous young spy, aka Mrs. Mak (Wei Tang in her first role), at the perpetual mahjong game. She excuses herself, is driven to a café where she makes an innocuous sounding phone call. At the other end, a man hangs up and tells his gang: "It's now." They load their guns. Back at the café, we watch the spy leisurely leave a lipstick stain on her coffee cup, apply perfume, and look out the window. It will be a long, long time before we return to now.

Flashback four years. The spy's a university student in Hong Kong, recruited into a patriotic drama by a firebrand young director. The clueless cast decides to take direct action against their oppressors, utilizing the director's connection to the collaborator Yee who will become the spy's target and lover. He suggests they take on a summer vacation project for extra credit: Kill Yee. "But what do we know about killing people?" asks a shocked colleague. He should realize nobody ever takes sensible advice in the movies.

Yee and the spy are slowly attracted to each other. (You can pretty much append "slowly" to everything that transpires.) Wearing a painted-on peekaboo-top sapphire-blue dress, she sits down to a private dinner with him. A tuxedoed pianist plays Western-style lounge music. She explains how her husband doesn't understand her and isn't around much, and accepts hard liquor, grimacing at its bite. Candles are lit. They smoke. In this scene, slow works. It takes time for them to recognize how strongly they're attracted, for him to relax his habitual caution, for her to shed her role -- the most dangerous hazard of undercover work is losing track of which way is up. Yee is played by killer-handsome Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love, 2046). Together, these two in this scene could be Bogart and Bacall. They smolder.

The conspirators notice a slight hitch in their brilliant plan. Their Mrs. Mak lacks the sexual experience of a married woman. In fact, she's a virgin. Luckily, one of them favors prostitutes, so he gets to break her in. There's some comic relief when the spy's on top, dutifully banging away, and her sex tutor observes, "I think you're getting the hang of it." "Shut up," she tenderly replies.

Then Yee's abruptly transferred, an unexpected visitor to the conspirators' posh lair blows their cover, and it seems to be all over with an hour and a half still to go, and with Yee and Mrs. Mak unconsummated. Our spy must be thinking, "I had to screw that dweeb for nothing?" Flash forward three years, and we do it all over again in Shanghai, where everybody has ended up. No wonder this thing runs two hours and forty minutes.

Finally, the infamous sex scenes arrive. In #1, Yee slams Mrs. Mak into a wall, rips off her clothes below the waist, throws her down on the bed, demonstrates a couple uses for his belt, and enters her from behind. But he's gentleman enough to unbind her wrists once he's inside. Only then does he kiss her. During the thrusting, she raises her head to show him her pleasure. Yee shoves her down by the neck for going off-script. After Yee leaves, Mrs. Mak is lying on the bed with her nether quarters still exposed. She gives a little smile.

Sex scene #2 features an unshaven female armpit, very erect nipples, and all those gymnastic coital positions. The lovers are nude, but we never glimpse the male organ, though there's plenty of thrusting. Mrs. Mak is in ecstasy; Yee barely breaks his poker face. Sex scene #3 ratchets up the tension. The spy glances at Yee's holstered pistol, responding to his accusing glare by covering his eyes with a pillow.

A musical interlude mirrors the long ago dinner when they got to know each other. Here our spy sings to Yee with as deep emotion as she feels in bed with him. We're grateful that her exquisite gestural song gets enough time to put us under its spell. It seems to yearn for a hiatus in the war, a vacation from roles and duty so the lovers could have enough time for themselves. It makes clear that Lust, Caution is more operatic than cinematic, with sex replacing the arias. The epic scope, the step-by-step march toward inevitable tragedy, the fascination with who the characters are rather than what they do, even the often ludicrous plotting -- they're all here.

The forces compelling the two to their fates cannot be escaped. The spy disturbs her superiors reporting ambiguously how deeply they're entwined along with why she wants Yee dead: "Every time he hurts me until I bleed and scream. Then he is satisfied." (The words of this speech, its overwrought imagery and anguish, would be perfect for opera.) The plotters move quickly to exploit a momentary lapse on Yee's part, and his life is suddenly in his lover's hands. The climactic tempo shift to the rapid editing rhythms of a thriller is dizzying compared to the stately pace afore.

Despite its languid progression, there's plenty to appreciate in Lust, Caution, not least the immersion in Chinese culture at a turning point of Western influence. Visually, enjoy the splendid costumes and note the frequent use of mirrors, windows, and picture frames reflecting and distorting, a commentary on appearances, illusions, watching, and being watched.

And use the time to ponder this: Is the film too slow or are we watching it too fast?

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