The very first Ang Lee film that I remember seeing was The Ice Storm. The movie was detached and quite beautiful, I recall. I have since seen it two or three more times. Early on, I confused Lee with Atom Egoyan; I saw The Sweet Hereafter that same year, and the two directors and their movies seemed to blur together. Each movie offered up the hardest of truths — that death comes to even the most innocent of people — and unspooled against cold northern landscapes.

What has impressed me most in the eleven years since is how difficult it must be to put Ang Lee in a box. He and his frequent collaborator, the screenwriter (and Focus Features CEO) James Schamus, flit from movie to movie, tackling such disparate settings as the Civil War and the pages of a comic book; such varying topics as sexual independence and political revolution. That Schamus in particular can move so fluidly from one film to the next, when the subjects are so wildly different, creates in me a respect that I don’t have for writers who repeat themselves. Which is to say a great number of screenwriters do not impress me all that much. (Although I will concede that Schamus has two great advantages: an able collaborator in Ang Lee, and a CEO chair in his own film studio.)

In any case, my interest in Lee’s movies began to dwindle after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I was among those disappointed by his take on the green giant in 2003’s Hulk, ambitious though it was. Brokeback Mountain never really appeared on my radar; I’d read Annie Proulx’s short story years before, but never felt compelled to repeat the experience in a theatre. So when Lust, Caution was released, I didn’t take as much notice as I might have back in the late ’90s.

And that’s my mistake. Lust, Caution is such a passionate film, with such a sprawling, intense story, that I regret having missed it until now, well over a year after its U.S. release. Set during the Japanese occupation of China in World War II, the movie patiently unrolls its story of patriotism, betrayal, deception and love over a 158-minute running time. The length is never an issue. Every shot of the movie is a piece of art, and while it never rushes ahead of itself, it doesn’t ever lose its momentum.

The story, based on the 1979 short fiction by Eileen Chang, follows a small group of Chinese students who, outraged at the Japanese presence in Shanghai, and even more incensed by the collaboration of high-ranked Chinese officials with the enemy, decide to infiltrate the life of one such official, and execute him. The students include the instigator Kuang (Wang Lee-Hom), who fans the youthful patriotism they all feel, and first suggests that they stop shooting cans and bottles in their spare time, and go after a real target; and the naive young Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang), who has just discovered her natural talent for the stage, and who becomes the amateur activist group’s leading lady.

Innocent and daring enough to believe they have an opportunity to strike a blow for China, the students author a false identity and clever backstory for Wong. Their target is one Mr. Yee, a high-ranking police official. Wong soon ingratiates herself to Mr. Yee’s wife (Joan Chen), and eventually to Mr. Yee himself. But as Wong and her comrades near the moment of their long-awaited success, their plans are thwarted, and the group disbands, each scattered and slowly ground beneath the wheels of the occupying forces.

Three years pass before Wong finds Kuang again, who confides that he has been training as a spy, and that they have a new opportunity to finish what they previously could not. Wong easily resumes her role as Mak Tai Tai, the wife of an importer-exporter who is away from Shanghai on long-term business. She is soon invited to live with the Yees, and before too long, is involved in a torrid affair with Mr. Yee. Wong walks that fine line between duty and deception, between lust and performance, and ultimately between love and betrayal. The film thunders to its heartbreaking climax, and what transpires occurs because Wong is not professional enough to keep her personal feelings tucked away; what follows happens because Mr. Yee is a professional, no matter what his heart tells him.

The movie is a grand tragedy. Lee creates a wonderful vision of wartime China, whose citizens surge through the streets in lovely Westernized attire, and who stand in lines for bags of rice, and who do not rise up against their invading enemy. The resistance is a tragic affair of its own, one that will forge any brutality it must in the name of eventual success. One such brutal act occurs during the students’ own private infiltration, when, Lord of the Flies-style, the boys in the group rise up against a suspected collaborator and take his life, each sharing in the execution, each changed irrevocably by their participation.

That the movie is rated NC-17 should not deter anyone from seeing it. Much attention was given, particularly in China and Taiwan, to the graphic sex featured in the film. These scenes are anything but titillating, and are quite essential to the path Wong Chia Chi must travel as a spy for the resistance. Ang Lee and James Schamus stood firm in their decision not to trim the movie to avoid the NC-17 label, and the result is not only a fully-formed movie, but possibly the greatest argument for the ineffectitude of the NC-17 rating. Lee’s film is anything but pornography, with a ratio of about 150 minutes of non-sexual content to perhaps 10 minutes of sexual content.

Wei Tang’s performance is nuanced and subtle, particularly when she shares the screen with Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai). Yee is a man of two faces; in public he is reserved, formal; in private, with Wong, he is violent, authoritative, dominating. Wong’s shock at their first sexual encounter — she curls on the bed in a near-fetal position as he ties his shoelaces — is overcome by conflicting emotions: pride in her achievement for her mission, and warmth at having drawn out of Mr. Yee any emotion whatsoever. Wong is a fascinating woman with a talent for reading her surroundings and company and adjusting her own performance to suit the moment. Had she continued her theatre career, she might have blossomed into a great improvisational actress. Instead, this becomes her greatest asset as a spy, and saves her from suspicion more than once.

While the supporting cast gets the job done, with occasional flourishes, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is the only actor onscreen who matches Wei Tang’s performance. His early scenes are fleeting, his expressions unreadable, his body language silent and guarded. But as he falls prey to Wong’s deception, he gradually becomes more complex and interesting. He willfully blinds himself to his usual instincts for self-preservation, often letting Wong’s attentions pull him away from business, and guiding him to go easy on her when she inadvertently stumbles across him in the middle of his work. Ang Lee reportedly asked Chiu-Wai to study the performances of Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris and Humphery Bogart in In a Lonely Place, intent on creating a sense of “wounded masculinity” for the character of Mr. Yee. Whatever the direction, the actor achieves something terrific here with very little dialogue.

Lee makes an excellent choice as well by hiring Alexandre Desplat to compose the score. I’m not as familiar with Desplat’s work as I’d like, though I’ve seen several of his recent American efforts. (The past three years, it seems, Desplat has graduated from an almost exclusively French resume to scoring a number of significant U.S. films, among them The Painted Veil, The Golden Compass, The Queen and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.) The score is more universal than influenced by traditional Chinese music, and it’s saturated with longing and remorse.

The movie’s final scene is marvelous, framing that choice I mentioned before — Wong’s lack of professionalism is an act of mercy; Yee’s absolute professionalism is an act of necessity, and probably will seal his heart away forever — against a memento of the romance that bloomed in the middle of a great deception. This is Ang Lee’s strongest film yet, a wonderful success.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008   

the blog and design portfolio of Jason Gurley. (Learn more.) This site has been around since 1998; me, since 1978. In 2005 I drove 3,000 miles to see a movie. 2009 is pretty aimless so far, but I'm sure I'll get around to something sooner or later.

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Lust, Caution
Double Indemnity
Iron Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
There Will Be Blood
Gone, Baby, Gone
Live Free or Die Hard
The Indian Runner
The Iron Giant
Contact
An Inconvenient Truth
X-Men: The Last Stand
Superman Returns
Enigma
Nobody's Fool
Look, Up in the Sky
Numb3rs
Mission: Impossible III
Heaven
The Abyss
The Constant Gardener
The Mosquito Coast
The Hustler
Limbo
Grizzly Man
The Verdict
Superman Returns
Elizabethtown
Battlestar Galactica
You Can Count on Me
Rolling Roadshow 2005
The American President
My DVD collection

01. dreaming of falling
02. marvelous descent
03. a conversation
04. the colors
05. huffnagle island
06. a hundred million
07. sixty-six stories
08. anyone earthbound
09. a girl named eleanor
10. a route obscure and lonely
11. a certain stillness
12. this is jack
13. wide flat lands
14. going home
15. girl unscrewed
16. slow rehabilitation
17. twenty-three stories
18. a far-off point
19. fifteen years quiet
20. a one-beer fella
21. luminescence
22. one-sided conversation
23. hearts big and stupid
24. nineteen seventy-eight
25. first light
26. a hundred years
27. too long to stop now
28. plainswept
29. a widower in training
30. spies and assets
31. thirty years and then some
32. leaping over couches
33. cricket song
34. eleanor's first kiss
35. like so much ballast
36. too much
37. the longest wait
38. the second ice storm
39. rocket summer
40. waiting
41. wax wings
42. breakup
43. tough beans
43. the heavy gray sea