Ballsy cinema

>> Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is a risky and explicit slow-burner about sex, love and loyalty

by MARK SLUTSKY

Of all the beautiful, memorable images that have flickered across the silver screen in 2007, I’m afraid to say that a shot of Tony Leung’s testicles as he humps Wei Tang in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution may be the most indelible. It was certainly all anyone could talk about when the film came up in conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, which may be unfair to a movie whose qualities are otherwise quite subtle. Besides the sex scenes, which are raunchy enough to have earned the film an NC-17 in the U.S., the film is understated and underplayed, another quintessentially Lee portrait of desperate, destructive forbidden desire.

Lust, Caution is set in the late ’30s and early ’40s, largely during the WWII Japanese occupation of China. The movie jumps back and forth in time and place, between Hong Kong and Shanghai. In the chronologically earlier sections of the movie, young Wang Jiazhi (Tang) joins a theatre troupe made up of idealistic, politically-minded young students who soon turn into an underground dissident cell. They groom Tang to seduce the high-ranking, cruel collaborator Mr. Yee (Leung), but after she’s penetrated his inner circle, they’re forced to flee after one of his manservants discovers them.

Later, in Shanghai, Tang meets Leung, who doesn’t suspect her treachery, once more, and is re-activated by the resistance. She gradually seduces him, and their relationship plays out in intense, often violent trysts, as the resistance, which clearly cares more for its aims than her life, patiently waits for the right moment to strike.

If you saw Paul Verhoeven’s most recent movie, this should seem very familiar; in a lot of ways, Lust, Caution feels like Black Book Goes to Shanghai. But while Verhoeven’s film is lively, kinetic and perverse, Lee’s is slow (it’s about three hours long), intensely psychological, and, well, perverse too, in its own, less exuberant way.

Leung is fine as usual and Tang’s performance is brave, tender and kind of amazing. But the movie demands a lot of patience (especially during the glacial first hour) and the payoff may not be sufficient for everybody’s tastes—despite the abundant sexing.

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