Lust, Caution Sets The Screen Aflame
The critically acclaimed film is also Taiwan’s official entry to the Best Foreign Language Film race in next year’s Academy Awards.
A startling erotic espionage thriller about the fate of an ordinary woman’s heart, it is based on the short story “Se, Jei” by Chinese author Eileen Chang, and stars Asian cinema icon Tony Leung (“Hero,”“Infernal Affairs”) opposite screen newcomer Tang Wei.
“Lust, Caution” begins in Shanghai in 1942. The World War II Japanese occupation of this Chinese city continues in force. Mrs. Mak, a woman of sophistication and means, walks into a cafe, places a phone call, and then sits and waits. She remembers how her story began several years earlier, in 1938 China.
She is not in fact Mrs. Mak, but shy Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei). With WWII underway, Wong has been left behind by her father, who has escaped to England. As a freshman at university, she meets fellow student Kuang Yu Min (Wang Lee-hom). Kuang has started a drama society to shore up patriotism. As the theater troupe’s new leading lady, Wong realizes that she has found her calling, able to move and inspire audiences’– and Kuang.
The naively patriotic Kuang convenes a core group of students to carry out a radical and ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Each student has a part to play; Wong will be Mrs. Mak, who will gain Yee’s trust by befriending his wife (Joan Chen) and then draw the man into an affair. Wong transforms herself utterly inside and out, and the scenario proceeds as scripted – until an unexpectedly fatal twist spurs her to flee.
With no end in sight for the occupation, Wong – having emigrated from Hong Kong–– goes through the motions of her existence. Much to her surprise, Kuang re-enters her life. Now part of the organized resistance, he enlists her to again become Mrs. Mak in a revival of the plot to kill Yee, who as head of the collaborationist secret service has become even more a key part of the puppet government. As Wong reprises her earlier role, and is drawn ever closer to her dangerous prey, she finds her very identity being pushed to the limit.
“To me, no story of Chan Ailing’s [Eileen Chang] is as beautiful or as cruel as ‘Lust, Caution,’” explains Ang Lee. “She revised the story for years and years – for decades – returning to it as a criminal might return to the scene of a crime, or as a victim might re-enact a trauma, reaching for pleasure only by varying and re-imagining the pain. Making ‘Lust, Caution,’ we didn’t really ‘adapt’ Chan’s work, we re-enacted it, just as her characters act and re-enact their parts.”
Lee continues, “Chan describes the feeling Wong had after performing on stage as a young woman; the rush she felt afterwards, that she could barely calm down, even after a late-night meal with her friends from the theater and a ride on the upper deck of a tram.
“When I read that, my mind raced back to my own first experience on the stage, back in 1973 at the Academy of Art in Taipei,” Lee adds. “The same rush of energy at the end of the play I had acted in; the same late-night camaraderie; the same wandering. I realized how that experience was central to Chan’s work, and how it could be transformed into film.
“She understood play-acting and mimicry as something by nature brutal: animals, like her characters, use camouflage to evade their enemies and to lure their prey. But mimicry and performance are also ways we open ourselves, as human beings, to greater experience, to indefinable connections to others, to higher meanings, to art, and to the truth,” Lee concludes.
“Lust, Caution” opens in theaters across the country on Nov. 7.
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