***/****
starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom
screenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, based on a short story by Eileen Chang
directed by Ang Lee
by Bill Chambers Blessed with an achingly beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a more tasteful Blackbook, which is odd considering how much more graphic it is in its depiction of not just sexuality but, thanks to a darkly-comic homage to Torn Curtain, violence as well. Where Blackbook director Paul Verhoeven is a vulgarian, though, Lee projects civility and cultivation. That's how he so often manages to shank you. The affair between secret-service man Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, never viler) and a young freedom fighter masquerading as a Mahjong-playing housewife (the incandescent Tang Wei) in pre-revolutionary Shanghai plays out in an interminable series of rape scenarios from which Lee never flinches, fostering an impression of artistic integrity that Lee has been only too happy to perpetuate by blithely accepting the MPAA's ruling of an NC-17 rating for the film. Alas, post-Brokeback Mountain, the intensity of the In the Realm of the Senses-style sex scenes is too conspicuous for its own good, prompting extratextual questions about Lee's motives. Friend and colleague Norman Wilner said something in passing that really got me thinking: that he would feel like Lee is rhetorically asking us, "Is this what you wanted from Brokeback?" had he more faith in Lee's intellect. At any rate, in light of the sheepishness of Brokeback Mountain's same-sex encounters, the gratuitousness of Lust, Caution's hetero liaisons does strike a note of methinks the lady doth protest too much. Yet the picture gets around to honouring its pretensions towards truthfulness in a climax that exposes the sham of Blackbook's romantic sacrifices and narrow escapes (Mata Hari will always face down a firing squad), even if it's only later, at home in the dark, that the full weight of Lust, Caution's misanthropy comes crashing down on you. If Lee is ultimately too prosaic to ever be anything but a great middlebrow filmmaker, consider what an oxymoron that is; we're lucky to have him. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations
