Dir. Ang Lee, 2007, China/US, 158 mins
Cast: Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen
Review by Mike Bartlett
‘Tis the season to be watching lovely ladies doing lewd things for comrades and country. Following hot on the high heels of Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book – whose plot is so similar, it’s hard not to compare the two – comes Ang Lee’s tale of a young student forced into seducing a collaborationist during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1940s. Her job is to gather vital information for the rather naïve and clumsily managed resistance movement and eventually lead her prey into an ambush. But the course of true seduction does not always run true…
Whereas Verhoeven crafted a racy “sexpionage” thriller out of this material, Lee goes for a quieter, more sympathetic approach. No leg-flashing, pubic-hair-dying,
woman-of-the-world heroine here, but an ingenue caught up in events she doesn’t fully comprehend. Whereas Carice van Houten’s character seemed to flash through events with barely a backwards glance, here we are made to feel the full burden of the female spy’s compromising situation. Her pain, her guilt, her growing inability to separate love from lust. The whole treatment of the scenario is more realistic, too. Leung’s politician is more convincingly corrupted than the ridiculous “nice Nazi” Verhoeven gave us. The course of seduction is more believable, with Tang Wei’s “hurt kitten” act a more acceptable lure than Outen’s bright-eyed, ultra-available come-on. And the sex is correspondingly more real – grasping, sweaty, brutal. So brutal, in fact, that these much-touted bedroom scenes are not so much titillatingly explicit as painful to watch.
But it’s here – in the very heart of Lee’s film – that the problems start. For he’s careful to show, through her facial and bodily reaction during intercourse, every nuance of emotion running through Tang Wei’s protagonist at that point. Wei responds with an outstanding performance – frankly, throughout the film, she acts the socks off everyone else on screen, partly because their characters are less well-drawn. But it’s the very fact that her psychological landscape is so clearly mapped out that blunts the film’s edge. Throughout Black Book, Outen maintained that extraordinary blank stare, the one so beautifully captured on the movie poster – a stare that could be read as voraciously sexual or utterly determined. It’s a look that’s so ambiguous, it invites the viewer in, to wrestle with it, to interpret its meaning. Is she turned on? Is she just play-acting? In Lust, Caution, there are few such doubts, the paradox being, then, that the viewer is thus brought closer to the character’s inner feelings but, at the same time, kept out of any interaction with the film. It’s an object lesson – to an era of cinema that has forgotten it – in the important art of filming faces.
Verhoeven’s movie is more a ripping yarn than a serious comment on war, and is further diluted by a series of outrageous twists. It’s simplistic…but compelling. Lee’s, on the other hand, feels ponderous – it takes a good hour to sputter into life. His camera style and editing schema feel jittery, perhaps to convey the sense of discomfort and paranoia in his protagonist. But it feels rather more like a director uncertain of how to negotiate unfamiliar territory – connections between events and characters feel disjointed and clumsy with the result that a brutal killing some 30 minutes in feels more like a set piece than a crucial, emotionally-charged moment. Intriguing elements – like the carefully-reconstructed portrait of the more cosmopolitan, racially-integrated society that was pre-war China – get lost in the whirl and are not thoroughly explored. Similarly, Lee’s play with recurring symbols – the lipstick on the glass, the pun on “playing” (whether to do with mah jong, infidelity or living the high life while others suffer in abject poverty) – falls flat and ultimately feels like a directorial flourish, rather than a concentrated development of theme.
The truth is, for all its attention to detail (Lee’s governing characteristic as a filmmaker), Lust, Caution has the dubious distinction of making Black Book seem more convincing. The ruthlessly stripped-down mechanics of the latter’s plotting ring truer than the arduous journey undertaken by Lee; Verhoeven’s breathless urgency forces us to accept the heroine as an agent of lust and gives us no time to question it. Which leads one to the uneasy conclusion that the world of “sex and spying” – though a horribly real phenomenon for many women in wartime – can only work in fiction in one register, that of the erotic thriller. To treat it as serious romantic drama somehow renders it trite. Verhoeven’s film burns; Lee’s smoulders but ultimately fails to catch fire.
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