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Saturday, Jul 05, 2008
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Lust, Caution? More like slow, Ang(st)-ridden |
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| Lust, Caution? More like slow, Ang(st)-ridden | ||
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by Lorelei Quenzer -
SGN A&E Writer Lust, Caution Directed by Ang Lee Starring Tang Wei, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Joan Chen Opens October 12 Spy story Lust, Caution, Ang Lee's follow-up to the achingly beautiful Brokeback Mountain, is gorgeously photographed and surprisingly sexy. Too bad it's also mean, cold and a great big yawn. Told mostly in flashback, the film's structure is, at first, intruiging. We begin in 1940's Japan-occupied Shanghai , in a lavish apartment where Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei) is playing mah jongg with women of an obvious social status, discussing matters of seemingly little or no importance to anyone but the leisured class. Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen, Saving Face) is the party's formidable hostess, and her husband (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, In the Mood for Love), dropping in for a moment to monitor his wife's spending and leer at Mak Tai Tai, is a bigwig in Shanghai security; in point of fact, he's a high-profile Japanese collaborator. But Mak Tai Tai is not the innocent party guest from Hong Kong her mah jongg partners believe: she is really Wang Jiazhi, radical student activist and member of a political cell whose mission is to assassinate Mr. Yee. It's a little like the Free French Forces trying to take out René Bousquet: he makes a tempting target, but Alistair MacLean couldn't write you a plot device big enough to get these guns to Navarone. From what is clearly a key moment in the assassination plot, director Lee leaps back five years in time and the meat of the story unfolds: how the student group assembled and identified their goal; how they trained; what they did to get in position to carry out their plot, etc. Of course Wang Jiazhi is the center of the group. She's the bait, dangled in front of Mr. Yee to lure him away from his guards and keepers and within range of his would-be assassins. Lee closely examines the sacrifices of a soldier for a cause, along the way exploring familiar themes of alienation and unrequited love. Wang's emotions are palpable as she swings back and forth, between anxiety about her increasingly tender feelings for her would-be victim to anticipation of the act - of love, of death - and we're fixated, both on her regret and her exhilaration. Is she captivated or just plain captive? Her intimacy with Yee, her enforced role-playing, the possibility she'll be caught or will give herself away&. It all leads up to an ending that will be difficult for Western audiences to accept. Unfortunately, it takes too long to get there. The oh-so cautious romantic feelings Wang harbors for one of her co-conspirators; the long, slow movements she makes towards Yee (and vice-versa); the interminable cab rides where nothing is said, except with the eyes - frankly, it's more like watching a pair of cats fighting before the main event than is worth the time it takes. The movie works better when we're able to step back from the characters' impossibly tangled love lives and get grounded in the realities of 1940's Shanghai, as when Wang's personal sacrfices are starkly juxtaposed with the glib rhetoric of her cell's leader. The cinematography is beautiful, perhaps even especially during the explicit sex scenes that secured Lee his first NC-17 rating. But the passion of Wang and Yee's physical relationship doesn't really translate into a passionate audience reaction; instead, I walked away feeling a little cold about the characters' struggles, pretty disgusted by the amount of non-sexy sex I had to watch, and not a little apathetic about the story's resolution. |
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