‘Lust’ is vintage Ang Lee relationship tale
Published 11:21 pm Thursday, October 4, 2007
Yes, that’s a bona fide NC-17 rating for “Lust, Caution,” the new film by Oscar-winning director Ang Lee. That means that the sex scenes, which take up perhaps eight minutes of the running time of this 159-minute movie, are somewhat, ah, detailed.
Actors Tony Leung and Tang Wei are certainly all-the-way-naked in these scenes, so the rating is merited. But the dreaded NC-17 (horrors — a movie for grown-ups) has somewhat obscured the film itself.
Lee, who made “Brokeback Mountain” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” is a specialist in furtive relationships and unspoken passions. “Lust, Caution” fits the bill.
The setting is WWII-era Hong Kong and Shanghai, where the Japanese invaders have installed their brutal regime. Wong Chia Chi (Wei, in her first movie role) is an aspiring actress in a small theater group that turns from the stage to reality: They become an anti-occupation sleeper cell.
Their somewhat fuzzy goal: To assassinate a Chinese collaborator, Mr. Yee (Leung), whose cold-blooded cooperation with the Japanese has resulted in many deaths. Nobody quite comes out and says it, but the plan hinges on someone getting close, very close, to Mr. Yee — and that someone is probably the beautiful Wong Chia Chi.
The plot has affinities, presumably deliberate, with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” where Cary Grant pushed Ingrid Bergman into the bed of a Nazi spy. Here, director Lee simply follows out this idea to its logical destination: the messy (and in this case, sometimes ugly) business of sleeping with the enemy.
Mr. Yee is, unequivocally, not a nice man, so despite the movie’s beautiful look, things can’t turn toward conventional romance. Instead, this film builds (slowly) to a few definitive moments that alter the course of the story.
The final half-hour has a complex series of events, and they are more worth talking about than the sex scenes. I’m not sure why it takes two hours to get to these scenes; Lee’s trademark style of exchanged glances and pregnant pauses works well in a shorter movie, but it can become a bit dry.
Leung is the great, smoldering star of classics such as “In the Mood for Love” and “Infernal Affairs,” and he turns his sad-eyed intensity toward the dark side here. At first Wei, with her baby-doll looks, doesn’t seem seasoned enough to match him, but perhaps she’s fooling the audience while she’s fooling Mr. Yee. It looks like a star is born.
“Lust, Caution” HHH
Trademark: In Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong, an actress (Tang Wei) tries to get close to a collaborator (Tony Leung) to assassinate him. Director Ang Lee’s trademark language of exchanged glances and suppressed passion gets a little dry here, although the movie certainly explodes in its sex scenes. (In Mandarin, with English subtitles.)
Rated: NC-17 for nudity, violence
Now showing: Opens today at Egyptian
