Lust, Caution (2007)

Rating:
Director: Ang Lee
Starring: Tang Wei, Tony Leung, Joan Chen

What you need to know is that Lust, Caution, the new film from Ang Lee, is a complex, oblique, subtle film set in Shanghai in the late ’30s and early 1940s. It’s NC-17, ostensibly for the brief but intense sex scenes, but really because, in every sense, this is a movie for grownups. It tells a story, but gives the viewer no help in deciding the rights and the wrongs.

The film opens with four women, wives of officials in the collaborationist Chinese government serving the Imperial Japanese occupiers. Gradually we focus on the youngest of the women, and first we suspect her of an illicit affair, and then we suspect her of something much more. A flashback to four years previous introduces us to the future schemer as an innocent college student, and mysteries of her later situation unfold. More than that spoils the plot, not just in the “spoiler alert” sense, but in detracting from the pleasure of watching the film unfold and guessing—because you’re never told—what’s in the characters’ minds.

So what shall we talk about? It’s really easy to review the average Hollywood movie:

Does the third act pay off the premise of the first? Yes/no.
Calculate the ratio of Seen-It-Before to Well-That-Was-Kinda-Clever. Express as a fraction.
Does it make a halfway decent attempt at justifying its gratuitous inclusion of violence/sex/gross-out humor? Is it anything more than its shock hook? Short essay.
Are the characters consistent, cartoonish or consistently cartoonish? Circle one.
Is Nicolas Cage in the movie? Subtract 2 stars.

And so it goes.

If that were a reviewer’s full bag of tricks (extra credit for “contextualizing within the artist’s oeuvre), Lee’s compelling film would be unreviewable. Or it would be reduced by the vacuous mewlings of the criterati to Another Art Film. For instance, didja catch me using “compelling” there? That’s review-speak for “It’s good even without a car chase.”

Lust, Caution is a great movie. Mileage, depending on taste, will vary—the film is too long, though it never drags, and it’s not quite the “thriller” it’s being marketed as—but the acting is indisputably stellar. Newcomer Tang Wei and the ever-soulful Tony Leung (Hero, 2046) are just riveting. This kind of nuanced acting is so rarely seen (at least by me—all the festival-circuit stuff screens in the afternoon, and this ain’t my day job) that just watching Wei play innocence and conspiracy, love and hate, truth and lies, compassion and patriotism, is justification alone for forcing this film on everyone I know, like the crazy guy who insists his dessert is so damned tasty he’s obnoxiously shoving spoonfuls of it at his friends’ faces.

Speaking of spoon-feeding: One of your key differentiators between Hollywood Movies (in the derogatory sense) and Art Films (in the laudatory sense) is that Hollywood lays everything out for you, while the Artiste poses questions but leaves you, the lazy American sofa monkey, to puzzle out your own solutions. Lust, Caution does not do that. Lust, Caution does not even pose the questions. It gives you a complex story of lies within lies, of uncertain motives and emotional turmoil that is not black and white even when you’d think the moral situation is.

Here are some questions Lust, Caution put into my head:
When a group of students decides to go from putting on patriotic plays to raise money to fight the Japanese occupiers, are they heroes, assassins, or reckless children? We’d call them “terrorists” today, right? What are the moral implications of just sitting around one day going, “Or … we could just kill a guy.”
Why is one early scene of unexpected violence so awful, so gut-wrenchingly horrible? We don’t particularly care about the victim. There are no visible narrative or cinematic tricks at play. Is it the sheer lack of visible choreography that makes it so much more wrenching?
When you enter the enemy’s world and live in it, can you avoid becoming like them? Can you continue to see them as targets, foes, rather than human beings?
Can you fake love, or does the very act of acting like you’re in love inevitably shade into something like love?
How the hell did they make those sex scenes that freakin’ graphic, without just having the actors do it on camera? Seriously.
How do you reconcile the true humanity you might see in the person right in front of you, in a moment of honest vulnerability, with that person’s day job as a monster?
Does the fact that Ang Lee avoids the easy outs of showing us the brutality of the Japanese occupiers and their collaborationists—giving us barely a hint of what makes Leung’s character so presumably vile—make it harder to answer that previous question?
Is his decision to start the story near the end, then do an extended flashback, merely a narrative trick to show us where the film is going, thus raising questions that insure our interest, or is it indicative of his take on his heroine, and in which life she’s most real?

This is stuff I thought about in this movie. Conversely, the only questions I got from Die Hard With a Vengeance, which I quite enjoyed, were “Didn’t Bruce Willis’ character used to be vulnerable?” and “Could an 18-wheeler really beat a fighter jet in a fair fight?” So, you know, there are movies for all tastes and moods. But if there’s room in your cinematic diet for hypnotic acting, moral ambiguity, a perfectly unindulgent recreation of period Shanghai, and, you know, rough, graphic sex, Lust, Caution will be one of the best films you see this year.