Lust, Caution - Naughty nothingness

[summertime]

October 11th, 2007

Lust, Caution

Naughty nothingness

Melora Koepke


Ang Lee's latest, Lust, Caution, champions the former rather than the latter

Ang Lee's epic, prolonged story of forbidden love, Se, Jie (Lust, Caution in English), is an intricate, intimate wartime intrigue in which it takes a really long time for anything to happen. This only accentuates the extreme events of sex and murder that do, eventually, take place. The tension that can be infused into the most innocuous of sequences in the film - an interminable game of mah-jong, a college production of a patriotic play - was recently echoed in the conversation I had, in a stifling Toronto hotel room, with first-time actress Tang Wei and her entourage, consisting of a translator and several chaperones. (This team approach to the interview process is not uncommon for Chinese movie stars, though it is not ubiquitous, either - Maggie Cheung doesn't interview with chaperones, neither does Zhang Ziyi.)

In Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the mid-1940s, Wang Jiazhi (Tang), a young student participating in a pro-communist college drama troupe, hatches a plan to assassinate a high-profile Japanese collaborator named Mr. Yee. Wang masquerades as the wife of an import-export businessman and gains access to Mr. Yee's household via a social relationship with Mr. Yee's wife (Joan Chen). Then, over the course of many long years, she becomes Mr. Yee's mistress, and a lustful love-hate dynamic between the two vastly complicates her original agenda.

So how does a young first-time actress come to execute one of the more shocking and intense femmes fatales ever seen on a Chinese
screen, or anywhere?

"I think Ang had given me a lot of help to prepare the character," said Tang. "At the beginning, we worked on the character a lot, we talked and talked, maybe spent two or three days just talking about her, about her background and her feelings. Also, I read a lot of books... Also, I learned how to wear a cheongsam and high heels..."

Though singing, wardrobe and backstory all figure very prominently in both Lee's gorgeous period renderings and Tang's performance, it is doubtful whether Lust, Caution will ever be so famous for anything other than the extremely graphic sex scenes, in which rape and rapacious lovemaking are pretty much indistinguishable from each other. The scrupulousness of my paltry exchange with Tang Wei seems especially odd considering how little her scorching, violent and exceptionally intimate sex scenes with the beautiful movie star Tony Leung Chiu Wai leave to the imagination. (The version of the film set for release in America has been rated NC-17, and was banned in Hong Kong and in mainland China, where Lee edited a whole new, virtually sex-free version of the film.) At the film's premiere at the recent Venice Film Festival, the question on everybody's mind was: Did she or didn't she? To which, of course, Ang Lee responded something to the effect of, "If you have to ask, isn't that enough of an answer?" Still, I had to ask.

"My character and I, we are the same in that we both really like performance. And Ang really likes performance too," says Tang. "During shooting, we all just gave ourselves to the film. We just thought about the work, and we tried our best, it's very rare and good to get this chance to meet such a perfect crew. The whole thing was so perfect, so we just wanted to do more, try more, try harder. To see how long and how far we can go."



http://www.hour.ca/film/film.aspx?iIDArticle=13156