Lust, Caution: Wei Tang goes undercover, Ang Lee makes worthy entry into the realm of sexually-charged cinema

One of the enduring deficiencies in movies centers around their use of sex. Signifiers of sex are of course everywhere in movies, yet nothing could be more rare than the genuine evocation of sexual experience, its breath and heat and smell and fumbling, or than genuine sexiness, whether conveyed subtly or audaciously. But above all, movies frequently fail to utilize sex as a way to help tell a story, to flesh-out a character, to add texture or specificity to the atmosphere—all the things that any significant aspect of any movie should be doing, which is to say actually adding to a movie’s richness instead of just filling it with empty activity.

Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (Se, jie), based on a short story by Eileen Chang, has endeavoured to remedy this chronic deficiency. A Mata Hari tale set in Hong Kong and Shanghai between 1938 and 1942, Lee’s Golden Lion-winner, its title reading as some sort of warning road sign, is a broodingly paced and at moments heartsick evocation of youthful ideology up against virtually absolute power, with poorly organized thespians-turned-resistance fighters convincing a smart and rather fetching young actress (Wei Tang) to seduce and liquidate a high ranking government official (Wong Kar-Wai regular Tony Leung) guilty of collaborating with the occupying Japanese. One of the primary themes of Lust, Caution is that sex is never just a means to an end, and this goes not only for the movie’s protagonists but the filmmakers as well.

Usually when we declare a movie’s highlight to be its sex scenes we mean it as a slight, yet in the case of Lust, Caution the sex is so arresting, so powerfully rendered, and so deeply revealing of the duplicitous nature of the complex central characters that its something of a triumph for cinematic subtlety and animalistic spectacle both. A common complaint lobbed at Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is that its sex was somehow too subdued, too framed by a fussy, prettified mise en scène that’s managed to detach itself from the sexual immediacy. I’ve seen it only once, but it seemed to me that the sex in Brokeback simply stayed true to the nature of the basically old-fashioned nature vs. society tragic love story it wanted to tell, and I’d argue exactly the same thing in this new movie’s favour: the sex here is raw, cruel, intense, emotionally blurry and always uneasy, as it should be.

Leung, playing the most chillingly nefarious character I’ve ever seen him embody, is brilliantly menacing and totally compelling, at one moment possessing the charisma of an angst-ridden Bogart, at another, possessed by a brute urgency to crush his helpless desire for his immaculately seductive mistress. In the end however the story –and the movie as a whole– belongs to Tang, who proves to be every bit up to this exceedingly difficult role and generates much of the erotic charge purely through her relationship to Lee’s consistently carefully placed camera. She somehow manages to begin shaping her character from a place of absolute moral conviction and end in a place of dizzying compromise and moral ambiguity, her sense of self and purpose cracking apart.

Sure, Lee’s lighting can be excessively tasteful at times, and his pacing perhaps takes our willingness to let tension build of its own volition for granted –but I don’t think there are many other directors of his stature who could have brought such a combination of elegance and rapture to this story. He takes a lot of flack from some very good critics, but mainstream movies would do good to let a few more filmmakers of his flexibility, ambition and craft onto the studio lot.