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Review by Philip French, The Observer
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Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, with its frank scenes of
gay sex, was the first major movie to open here in 2006.
Two years later, his Lust, Caution, which has heterosexual
scenes of almost unparalleled frankness for a mainstream
picture, is the first major film to open in Britain in
2008. Like Brokeback Mountain, it will certainly end up
on many lists of the year's 10 best. The Taiwanese-born
Lee is a true auteur.
While moving from genre to genre, period to period (and
most of his films are set in the recent or distant past),
he never appears to repeat himself, yet he constantly
pursues personal themes and his films contribute to a
distinctive oeuvre. One of his recurrent concerns is with
people facing crises, often in changing times. Another
is the generational conflict between fathers and children.
The most interesting, however, is of characters forced
to adopt masks, to dissemble, to conceal their true nature.
This can be homosexuality (Brokeback Mountain, The Wedding
Banquet), political allegiances (the superb Civil War
western Ride With the Devil) or, in its most extreme form,
Hulk (generally regarded as his only real failure), where
the comic-book hero attempts to suppress the destructive
green monster that lurks inside him.
These themes come together in different ways in Lust,
Caution, which, like Brokeback Mountain, is expanded from
a short story by a woman writer, in this case by Chinese
author Eileen Chang, who died in California 12 years ago
at the age of 74. Set in Shanghai and Hong Kong between
1937 and 1942, it's a moody espionage thriller much influenced
by the Hollywood film noir, particularly Alfred Hitchcock
and exotic melodramas of Oriental intrigue. But events
are seen entirely from the point of view of Westernised,
middle-class Chinese men and women and taking place within
that community. This is not the China of Pearl Buck or
JG Ballard's Empire of the Sun.
The film's central character is Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei)
who we first meet in 1942 Shanghai, posing as the sophisticated
Mrs Mak Tai Tai from Hong Kong in the circle of the well-off,
mahjong-playing wives of top-level Chinese collaborators
living within the protected Japanese enclave. They're
like the pampered wives of Nazi leaders and quislings
in occupied Europe who don't inquire too closely into
their husbands' activities and avert their eyes from the
atrocities around them.
The horrors and humiliations of street life in Shanghai
are as convincingly re-created as the cosmopolitan suavity
that managed to carry on in wartime. We realise, however,
that Wong doesn't quite belong to this milieu and that
she has a covert relationship with Mr Yee (Hong Kong star
Tony Leung), the local secret police chief, rooting out
opponents of Wang Jingwei's collaborationist government…
Lust, Caution is an excellent thriller. It is also for
Lee an important inquiry into the divided lives of his
parents' generation. The script by Wang Hui Ling and James
Schamus, Lee's American collaborator as writer and producer,
is a fine piece of work. Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo
Prieto, whose films include Amores Perros and Brokeback
Mountain, and production designer Pan Lai have given the
film a mood and appearance of cool, exotic menace. The
score by French composer Alexandre Desplat, who wrote
the music for The Painted Veil and The Queen, is a subtle
blending of East and West with neat samplings of Hoagy
Carmichael's 'Stardust' and Elgar's Enigma Variations.
Lust, Caution is a triumph for international cinema.
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