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 thw 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.”

But Lust, Caution is a great movie.

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