“Lust, Caution” (shot by Rodrigo Prieto) at least has a suitably retro-dreamy look: This is a tasteful-looking picture, one that seems to have been buffed to a soft glow, like a piece of mellow vintage brass. And Lee couldn’t have chosen more perfect actors for these roles.
It’s always a pleasure to watch Joan Chen. She doesn’t have much to do here, but playing an aging, possessive beauty, she still manages to cast a quiet spell over the picture. Tang, with her fine features and always-questioning eyes, plays the seductress Wong with a deft balance of delicacy and toughness.
She’d need to have both of those things in luxurious quantities to stand up to Leung. He is one of the finest actors in Asian cinema, and if nothing else, “Lust, Caution” may at least bring him a wider, more appreciative audience in the West.
The love scenes in the last third of “Lust, Caution” are intense, affecting and beautifully filmed; they’re also emotionally raw in a way that’s surprising in a film that’s otherwise so ponderous and inoffensive.
One of the sex scenes essentially depicts a rape; later, the sex is consensual, and Lee shoots these scenes in a way that’s unapologetically erotic, not just safe and “pretty.”
In these scenes, Mr. Yee and Wong play out a world of aggression in bed, perhaps directed not so much at each other as at the unruly, dangerous universe they’re living in — when they lash out and claw and bite, it’s almost as if they’re relieved to come into contact with real human skin, instead of just elusive, maddening air.
As much as I approve of gratuitous sex in the movies, I concede there’s something rare and wonderful about sex scenes that actually illuminate the relationship between two characters, as those in “Lust, Caution” do.
Those sequences have also earned “Lust, Caution” an NC-17 rating from the chuckleheads at the MPAA ratings board, and I think I understand why: The sex scenes are the strongest, most moving and most significant portions of Lee’s movie, one place where his obsessive attention to detail actually serves him well instead of just clouding his judgment.
Those scenes aren’t so much explicit, or even sexy, as they are emotionally naked — which, of course, is what the ratings board is really afraid of.
I wish the rest of “Lust, Caution” were worthy of those scenes, and of the performances given by the actors. But I’m so glad that Lee didn’t cut his movie for American release. (He did cut it for the Chinese authorities, and while I wish he hadn’t capitulated, we all know those battles are harder to fight.) “Lust, Caution” is in so many ways a timid, overworked picture. But at least it has balls where they count.
Read ‘Lust, Caution’ at Salon
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