There’s a wonderful poem about adultery called “Story of a Hotel
Room” by the mysterious English poet, Rosemary Tonks, which ends
like this:
… someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.
Miss Tonks disappeared from public view some 30 years ago. Some say
she joined a fundamentalist Christian cult. But she left behind
this rebuke to sexual “liberation” that, for our world, is the
dirty secret sex used to be. Occasionally other artists give us a
glimpse of it, but the last place we might expect to see one is at
the movies — for which sex “without permanent intentions” has
become the stock in trade. That’s why
Lust, Caution
(
Se, jie), the superb new picture by Ang Lee, comes as
such a shock. Based on a story by Eileen Chang and set in war-time
Shanghai, it tells the story of a plot by some Chinese students to
assassinate Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), the head of the collaborationist
government’s secret police, by setting a honey trap for him. But
the bait, the beautiful Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), discovers too
late that she herself has been caught in Miss Tonks’s trap.
It is a scenario of almost stunning audacity. The audience is
required to sympathize with a vile murderer and tyrant who
routinely and without compunction tortures and executes his fellow
Chinese on behalf of the country’s Japanese occupiers. Moreover,
the patriotic students who want to kill him come across as a bunch
of pathetic amateurs and dreamers, easily manipulated by a sinister
Communist agent as ruthless as Mr. Yee himself. As if all that were
not enough, most of the story is told in flashback. It begins as
the students are finally about to spring their long-prepared trap
on Mr. Yee, takes them up to the point where Wong gives the coded
signal, “It’s now” — and then takes us back four years to the
origins of the plot among a group of freshmen at Hong Kong
University. Some two and a half hours later, we finally get back to
the point where we were in the first few minutes.
Even if the characters — apart from Wong — were more
sympathetic than they are, you’d think that this was a sure way to
lose the audience along the picture’s long, meandering way. I can’t
remember the last time I sat through a nearly three-hour movie
without resentful feelings that it was a good deal longer than it
needed to be. Not Lust, Caution. Everything works
triumphantly. Not only does the cinematic story-telling — almost a
lost art in Hollywood these days — keep you on the edge of your
seat throughout, but the atmospherics, to which latter-day
Hollywood has got into the habit of sacrificing plot, character and
plausibility, knock the spots off anything the dream factory has
produced for ages. This is by far the best movie I have seen this
year.
Worth a special mention in the category of atmospherics that
also advance the plot are the sex scenes. These are another example
of Mr. Lee’s boldness, not only in incurring for his film the
dreaded NC-17 rating, which automatically reduces its commercial
potential, but also in daring the challenge of banality and
triviality. I certainly wouldn’t have thought it was possible
anymore to show on-screen sex that was not merely pornographic or
cliched or both, but Ang Lee’s two wonderful leading actors pull it
off, along with their clothes and their inhibitions. Here at last
is that hitherto undiscovered Holy Grail of erotic cinema, sexual
imagery that really is artistically essential to the film’s serious
purposes.
These include an exploration of the human heart and the very
nature of human sexuality which has unspoken or understated
political as well as spiritual ramifications, though the film never
becomes either propagandistic or preachy. It transcends ideology —
as, by the way, I thought Mr. Lee’s previous film, Brokeback
Mountain, did not — by making us see its irrelevance to the
real well-springs of human action and feeling. As a meditation on
power, and what it does to those who possess it, and on sex in
relation to power and trust, I don’t know anything to beat it. It’s
also a movie about acting, and how the parts we play in life end up
determining who we are. Oh, and by the way, it’s also a great
tragic love story to rank with the best the movies have ever
produced.
Finally, mention should be made of Mr. Lee’s fidelity to
historical truth, both moral and material (at least so far as I can
tell). If the story-telling in Lust, Caution seems nearly
miraculous in its adherence to an almost-vanished standard of movie
craftsmanship, the resolute refusal to impose upon the past the
values and assumptions of the present seems to me at least equally
astonishing. All this together produces an emotional logic as
compelling as the narrative logic, and it’s bound up in a perfectly
neat Chinese package with a lovely original score by Alexandre
Desplat that is redolent of the romantic Hollywood movies of its
period which are another of Wong’s guilty pleasures and a recurring
motif. Don’t miss it on any account.
