![]() She is tasked with infiltrating Yee’s wife’s social circle by posing as a trader’s wife, eventually becoming Mr. Yee, a traitor to China who corroborates with the Japanese. A soft-spoken university student in Hong Kong at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Wong is recruited by her patriotic fellow students into a very amateur assassination plot against Mr. Part of this pleasure and pain is derived from watching the main character, Wong Chia Chi, have her innocence torn away from her as she puts her mind and body on the line for her country. “To me, no writer has ever used the Chinese language as cruelly as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang),” wrote Lee in an afterword for the film, “and no story of hers is as beautiful or as cruel as ‘Lust, Caution.’ She revised the story for years and years… returning to it as a criminal might return to the scene of a crime, or as a victim might reenact a trauma, reaching for pleasure only by varying and reimagining the pain.” While Lee described the idea of a secret relationship in his more recent, and more widely known film Brokeback Mountain as a lofty ideal punctured by real-world expectations, the dynamic in Lust, Caution was love at its most agonizing - something that Zhang herself sought to evoke in her writing. ![]() Even his earliest films su ch as The Wedding Banquet (1993) - in which a committed gay man must go through the motions of a traditional wedding to please his parents - explore how everyone has secrets that they must keep under wraps. The thread that best connects Lee’s films is that most explore the tension between performed identities and secret desires. Divorced from any of the context provided by the film’s plot, the raunchy, athletic, and sometimes violent depictions of sex left me both repulsed and intrigued.īut rewatching the film ten years later, it’s clear that this was essential to conveying these lovers’ complex, and at times dysfunctional dynamic, as well as the author’s intended message about love and duty. I first saw only the sex scenes as a college student, shown to me by a friend who wanted me to be as scandalized by them as he was. Though mainland audiences flocked to pirated sites to stream it, the film offended authorities for its “ glorification of traitors ” as well as the sex scenes - the latter of which resulted in lead actress Tang Wei’s ban from acting in China for several years. Lee’s film pads Chang’s short story to over two-and-a-half hours, ultimately earning the director a Golden Lion when the film premiered at Venice Film Festival in 2007. ![]() It ultimately leads to a betrayal that divided theatergoers when the film adaptation was released. Yee becomes very real, as he unexpectedly worms his way into her heart. The heroine of the lean novella was purportedly inspired by a real-life counterpart - Chinese spy Zheng Pingru - as well as some of the author’s own controversial history (Chang’s first husband was accused of being a traitor for the Japanese puppet government, a fact that probably would’ve landed her in hot water with readers at the time.) Whether or not her tale was indeed the inspiration for the book, Zhang ultimately spins a twisted love story of her own in which the spy’s faux relationship with Mr. Life Mirrors Artįollowing the success of Brokeback Mountain in the mid-2000s, Ang Lee chose to adapt the work of one of China’s most famous novelists, Eileen Chang, for his next project. ![]() But over a decade later, this tense, understated film is still worth closer examination. Reviews at the time of its release were mixed, and it was criticized for being overlong, profane, anti-patriotic, and anti-feminist. In Lee’s career, Lust, Caution often gets overlooked in favor of his epics such as Life of Pi and Crouching Tiger. īut perhaps truer in spirit to Lee’s tendency of exploring unspoken desires is Lust, Caution, an underrated spy thriller set in wartime China that is remembered most vividly for its explicit - the Motion Picture Association of America gave it an adults only (NC-17) rating - sex scenes. The high-flying blockbuster, which featured some of China’s most famous actors, is still considered a classic of modern Chinese wuxia film. My Own Private Cinema is a monthly RADII column that focuses on impactful and inspiring films from China’s cinema history.īy the mid-2000s, director Ang Lee had become a household name after the release of his film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
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