"Lust, Caution"

Set in Shanghai in the 1940s, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution offers stunning visuals and a slowly unfolding story of graphically portrayed sex and radicalism, says Sukhdev Sandhu

Ang Lee likes to play a waiting game. His films, such as The Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain, seem at first sight to be tranquil, lavish portraits of settled characters and stable societies. Only slowly do the lies and tensions and quiet seething that lie beneath their elegant surfaces start to emerge. Those unhurried beginnings run the risk of making audiences too fidgety and irritated even to care when the emotions finally combust.

Lust, Caution, co-written with James Schamus, is a perfect and perfectly divisive example of Ang Lee's style of filmmaking. At 158 minutes, it lasts a very long time: there are lots of fabulous outfits, delightful domestic interiors, close-ups of emotionless faces. Some people will find this smouldering build-up perfectly wonderful; others though will wish that Lee had borrowed a trick from the Swedish band Roxette, whose greatest hits album was called Don't Bore Us, Get to the Chorus.

 

The film begins in the Shanghai of 1942, a city in which many local men and women have chosen to collaborate with the occupying Japanese forces rather than fight them. An exception is Mak Tai-Tai (Wei Tang), the name assumed by a demure and apparently respectable college student called Wong Chia Chi. A few years earlier she had fallen under the influence of another student, the charismatic radical Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom), and, inspired also by her performance in a patriotic play in which she reduces audiences to tears, she agrees to be a femme fatale and try to seduce and help assassinate leading government collaborator Yee (Tony Leung).

 

All of this, plus her father's escape to England and the time she spent with other cell members calculating how best to ensnare the cold and apparently invulnerable Yee, is recounted during a slow and very long flashback at the start of the film.

Lee, who adapted a short story by Eileen Chang, is particularly good at evoking the coltish naivety of the young rebels: they talk in furious certainties, but are barely sexual beings, requiring one of their more clumsy-looking members to deflower Mak and give her the opportunity to learn how to use her body as a weapon of war.

Less comic is the scene in which they are driven to stab another collaborator who has discovered their deceptions. They take turns to hack away, penetrating him with almost the same gauche uncertainty as the fellow who took Mak's virginity. Each of them is mortified at the slowness of death and its messy viscerality. The gulf between the theory and the black-and-white clarity of "revolutionary violence" anticipates what happens when Mak manages to ensnare Yee.

The sex scenes between the pair of them are about as graphic as can be imagined outside explicitly porn-inspired films such as Shortbus. The couple heave and slap and adopt shapes and positions that would startle the compilers of the Kama Sutra. It's rightly erotic, but, just as Michael Winterbottom sought to do in 9 Songs, the sex embodies the complex, shifting and ambiguous dynamics of their relationship.

The first time they sleep together, Yee is so violent it seems like rape. We wonder: has he rumbled her true identity and is now punishing her? Is this the repressed, vicious carnality that underlies his official demeanour? We also wonder: will she cry out and confess? Is she going to die? Is she actually enjoying it? It's rare that a sex scene at the movies can sustain responses more conflicting and interesting than: was it a turn-on?

As such, for me it fully vindicated Lee's genteel pacing, and his decision to remake a 1940s-style espionage thriller without the lurid pulpiness of, say, Paul Verhoeven's recent Black Book.

In fact, helped by terrific performances from Wei Tang and from Leung, who imparts a melancholic longing to offset his character's savagery and paranoia, the film almost becomes a love story. It's a pleasure to be able to luxuriate in the quietly sensual, mah-jong-playing laziness of upper-crust Shanghai. A pleasure to watch a film as visually stylish as it is psychologically demanding. I wish it had been twice as long.