Lust, Caution

[October 3rd, 2007] To answer the most pressing question about Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution : Yes, there is certainly enough graphic sex in it to earn an NC-17 rating, but it’s not the sort of sex that happy people will enjoy watching. The characters played by Tang Wei and Tony Leung have violent sex. Then they have acrobatic sex. This is followed by mournful sex. All of it is very solemn sex. The orgasms look like death throes, and whatever lust is on hand resembles a miserable imperative more than anything like eagerness. There are, to be sure, some impressive displays of flexibility, which inspired in me two thoughts. The first was, I didn’t know you could do that. The second was, I can’t imagine why you’d want to.

Lee’s movie has started going wrong well before Leung sticks his crouching tiger into Wei’s hidden dragon. The 158-minute World War II espionage story has a promising opening hour as Wang Chia Chi, a college student played by Wei, is drawn into a Chinese resistance movement bent on assassinating Mr. Yee (Leung), a Japanese flunky with a weakness for adultery. The conspiracy builds to an unhappy but logical result: Wang loses her virginity, and everybody else loses their innocence. Cut to three years later, when Mr. Yee has risen to the top of the secret police, Wang has been moping purposelessly, and neither of the protagonists seems nearly as sympathetic as he or she did half an hour ago. Mr. Yee has transformed from a roué to a sadist, while Wang has degenerated from an idealist to a sex object in bright red lipstick. On the other hand, they are both a lot more willing to get naked. It’s not the most promising trade-off.

A funny thing about Ang Lee: Though he was born in Taiwan and is clearly fascinated by Asian tradition, it’s only in America that his movies have a pulse. The Ice Storm is perhaps the best literary adaptation of the ’90s, The Hulk has an undeniable zest for comic books (if not quite the feel for them), and Brokeback Mountain is a flawless tear-jerker. Nobody is going to cry over Lust, Caution —except maybe people who get all misty when they read the Kama Sutra. The movie bears a familial resemblance to the spy movies of the 1940s—it owes a special debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious —but while it shares the style, and Wei looks sumptuous in a black fedora, it’s ultimately drained of all delight. It’s sonorous and dull in the same way as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon : It takes disreputable, pulpy pleasures and beats them to death with decorum. Neither lover in Lust, Caution asks, “Was it good for you?”—because they both already know the answer. NC-17.