TIFF Reviews
Lust, Caution
Ang Lee
(157’, Taiwan)
*****
Ang Lee’s most accomplished film to date, Lust, Caution is an ode to the cinema of yore, replicating the glamour and style of old Hollywood while renewing its complex structures and themes. Lust, Caution’s subject, like many hallowed thrillers before it, is resistance—here the Chinese resistance during the second Sino-Japanese War of the ’30s and ’40s. Tang Wei plays Wang, a young woman swept away by a revolutionary enclave of students in Hong Kong, who soon finds herself used (in several senses of the word) as their mole, assuming the identity of socialite Mrs. Mak in order to cozy up to Japanese collaborator Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Wang’s disturbing compromises are clearly meant to recall those of Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia in Notorious, and Lee goes one further than Hitchcock by graphically presenting us with the sexual acts she must endure. The ideas remain the same, however, and are just as transfixing: the milieu and aftermath of war as high theatre; the pellucid, then obscuring, qualities of sex; the complex domain of female sexuality, especially as it is read—obsessively and constantly—by various factions of social and political power. (DB)
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