Lust, Caution (Lee, 2007): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.10pm
This film is also being shown on March 13th and 30th (a 35mm screening). Details here.
Time Out review:
There’s a superb and important early scene in Ang Lee’s absorbing spy
romance, set on a stylised (studio-shot) Hong Kong tram in 1939, as a
young troupe of Chinese actors board, flushed with the rousing success
of that night’s patriotic play. (The Japanese have already occupied
their homeland, British-run Hong Kong is soon to fall.) The exhilarated
lead character Wong Chia Chi (a remarkable, film-dominating debut
performance by newcomer Wei Tang) thrusts her head out the window to
taste the rain, as if to make physical and personal the night’s small
triumph. You see in that moment how the innocent young actress may be
persuaded, in patriotic duty, to adopt an alias, spy on and seduce, in
order to kill Tony Leung’s collaborationist chief of police. You
could call Lee’s Chinese-language version of Eileen Chang’s novella a
revisionist wartime thriller. Its sub-Brechtian moments are muted, but
it is more than happy to pay self-conscious attention to the period
setting, design and clothes to highlight, in echo of David Hare’s
‘Plenty’, the seductive role of dress as disguise and mask. Like Hare
(with his OAS volunteer, Kate Nelligan), Lee is interested in applying
an emotional and psychological realism to his heroine’s incredible
bravery. It seems, in wartime, some are able to assume grave
responsibilties, but – as Lee’s film quietly and provocatively suggests –
the actions of those that do make mockery of conventional, sex-based,
notions of what constitutes courage, honour, love or even patriotism
itself. In this sense, the real battlefield, the genuine theatre of
truth, in ‘Lust, Caution’ is the bed – the sex – in the arranged flat
three years later in Shanghai, something of a last tango wherein Leung’s
previously almost obsequiously mannered ‘traitor’ shows his true
colours, and Miss Wong, under her alias Mrs Mak, is transformed by the
ever-present knowledge that discovery is death. It’s not a companionable
film – Lee’s directorial discipline, objectivity and lack of
expressionist touch in the use of either Rodrigo Prieto’s camerawork or Alexandre Desplat’s score can push the viewer close to outsider-dom or voyeurism – but its dark romanticism lingers in the mind.
Wally Hammond
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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