Sherry Chandler » Lust, Caution
Lust, Caution
Roger Ebert says Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is about “the nature of sex,” which leads me to wonder a little bit about his home life, because the film I saw was more about the erotic nature of violence.
Certainly, the sex scenes dominate the film. So much so that The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane tells you that the sex starts at 95 minutes into this 2 hour 40 minute film, so that you won’t have to waste time watching the rest of it. Or, if you’re mostly interested in the costume drama, so you can leave before the sex starts. Either way, he sees the sex as the (ahem) climax of the film. He summarizes the plot thus:
The costume belongs to Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), one of a group of student actors who meet in Hong Kong in 1938 and, with the coming of war, hatch a subversive mission against the Japanese occupying powers. Wong is deputed to seduce Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a senior Chinese official collaborating with the Japanese, the plan being that she will lure him to his death. Wong is a fervid moviegoer (she goes to see “Intermezzo” and “Penny Serenade”), and that seems odd, since anyone schooled in Hollywood melodrama knows that female spies always fall in love with their male targets. And so it proves, the difference in “Lust, Caution” being that Wong and Yee, far from tumbling into a genteel swoon, embark upon a series of difficult grapplings, all harsh breaths and awkwardly locked limbs. Afterward, they lie not in sprawling abandon but in a needy, fetal curl.
“Harsh,” yes, “needy,” maybe, but I wouldn’t call it “love.” Yee begins his love-making with rape, complete with a belt beating, and continues to abuse Wong at every meeting, f*cking her til she bleeds while she has fantasies that the resistance group will burst in and scatter his blood and brains all over her. We know this latter because she tells us so. Yee is a brute who tortures captured resistance fighters and tells Wong that while doing so he pictures the prisoners on top of her.
Intermezzo, this is not. In fact, I think these Hollywood melodramas may be included for contrast. Or to indicate the distance Wong travels from Hong Kong, where she thinks she is playing a game of seduction, to Shanghai, where the full perverted nature of what she is doing is brought home to her. (Hard to write this without making bad puns.)
Everything about sex in this movie is skewed and twisted. To begin with, Wong’s father has escaped to the United States, taking his son with him but leaving Wong behind with promises to send for her later. The promise is never fulfilled.
Wong is sucked into the assassination plot because of her infatuation with the student leader, a beautiful boy named Kuang Yu Min (Lee-Hom Wang). Kuang Yu Min is most passionate about the resistance. He has lost a brother in the fighting and, as the only surviving son, he is not allowed to join the army. So he has something to prove. Though he more or less seduces Wong into the plot, he only approaches her sexually after she confesses to him and a resistance leader the perverse nature of her liaison with Yee (see above). Right after that confession, he follows her down the stairs, grabs her, kisses her. “Why didn’t you do that three years ago?” she asks. An essential question.
Three years ago, Wong had been a virgin who had to be initiated into sexual practices so that she could seduce Yee. It is not Kuang Yu Min who does this deed, but another member of the acting troupe, the only boy with experience — and that with whores. Wong’s sexual initiation is clinical, though we suspect she does it for love.
Admittedly, Wong does seem to have a certain talent for sex but what does her in, contrary to what Rex Reed seems to think, is not the rough play but a few moments of tenderness. It is this sentimental caving in that puts the film back in melodrama mode and that made me just furious that I’d sat through the whole, long, painful thing — especially because this tenderness includes the gift a a diamond the size of a quail’s egg. The film had left it’s melodramatic model way behind to make a cold hard point about the nature of sexuality in times of war and occupation, and it was infuriating to have it come crashing back to (stereo)type in the end.
It’s not a fresh story, and after all the nudity and brutal sex, there isn’t much of it left to tell. It’s positively amazing how boring so much sex can be when it subs for character development and compelling narrative. Despite Ang Lee’s beautiful images and masterful glimpses into the decadence and glamour of a lost Shanghai, and the limitless physical boundaries the two stars explore and then shatter, Lust, Caution is 157 minutes of tedium. The sex is painful and graphic without revelation (you never actually see anything), and neither of the two stars look like they’re having much fun. The outcome is predictable.
I think he misses the point about the sex; I don’t think the characters are supposed to be having fun. I think each may be punishing the other for what they themselves have done.
There is a passage in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (Viking, 1952) where Adam Trask has been picked up for vagrancy in Florida and sentenced to six months on a road gang. This would have been in the late 19th century.
Adam thought how a man doing an ugly or a brutal thing has hurt himself and must punish someone for the hurt. To be guarded at work by men with shotguns, to be shackled by the ankle at night to a chain, were simple matters of precaution, but the savage whippings for the least stir of will, for the smallest shred of dignity or resistance, these seemed to indicate that guards were afraid of prisoners, and Adam knew from his years in the army that a man afraid is a dnagerous animal.
In Lust, Caution, Mr. Yee says more than once, with some contempt, that everybody is afraid. When Wong says, “What about you?” he doesn’t answer.
Stephanie Zacharek, writing at Salon, points out that Lust, Caution is based on an elegant short story by Eileen Chang.
The Eileen Chang short story that’s the basis for Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” is as economical as a tightly wound ball of silk thread: Chang packs a lot of emotional yardage into a very small space as she examines, without ever conveniently demystifying, the complex relationship between a young spy in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and the dangerous government flunky she has been assigned to seduce.
There’s no doubt Lee admires Chang’s story; he quite possibly even loves it. But instead of doing the filmmakers’ job of taking the source material and modestly adding a bit here and subtracting there, of focusing on certain pertinent details and reluctantly leaving others behind, Lee and screenwriters Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus have instead stretched Chang’s admirably delicate story into a thin, underfed epic.
When the plot fails and the students are picked up by the secret police, Mr. Yee does not allow Wong to be tortured. She saved his life. He will not, or cannot, save hers.
__________
Update: My husband thinks it is the show of tenderness that makes Wong warn Yee. It could be argued that Yee has been softening toward her and goodness knows nobody else had wanted to do anything but use her beauty and intelligence. It might also be argued that Wong is just not capable of doing murder. But I am nevertheless offended that her moment of weakness comes in conjunction with the gift of a huge rare diamond. It’s all like some stupid deBeer’s commercial: “A diamond is forever.” It was a gaudy ugly ring.
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