Se, jie

Se,jie

Another remarkable movie of the Taiwan-born director Ang Lee. The plot is rather simple and develops with a rigorous, slow pace, with an obsessive attention to details. The director manages in creating a dark, oppressive atmosphere; "a scary place", "like hell", as he has described the movie. The power of lust is investigated: lust is used to lure a man into a dangerous trap, lust also offers a glimpse of ecstasy to characters caught in a world of violence and fear, lust/love brings people to death. Though not reaching the sublimity of Brokeback Mountain this movie leaves the viewer with a long-lasting impression. Great, intriguing performance of the newcomer actress Tang Wei.

Beware the high rating for this film. It's ponderous, boring, & should have an hour edited out. The only good thing I can say about it is the mah jong scenes & the glimpse of a detailed, powerful behind-the-scenes group of women who know how to do things no one else does. I wanted to see a movie about them & their intertwined stories. They were fresh & strong, vivacious & tough. The movie is very long, very slow, with not enough background to clue us in so that length & pace make sense. Acting: the minor characters are great; the leads - what's to like? We don't care about them - they have no passion, the sexy scenes are yucky: basically rape scenes - OK, so she is "willing" as it is her "job," but NO woman will watch these & think they are "love-making" or anything close; nor are they erotic. If you want close ups of crotches, look at some graphic *. Those scenes made the entire film tasteless, & distasteful, in the extreme. How about a little creativity here - who knows what the movie is "really" about - but do we really need to see another movie about women who are whores, prostitutes, sluts, etc; oh, yeah, it's OK, because they "choose" the job. Right. The film's center - I usually would write "heart" but it lacks one - is cold, without a strong point of view. I'd rather watch a documentary. I used to like Ang Lee's movies; in future I won't bother watching another one.

I can't understand why everyone is so enthusiastic about Lust Caution; perhaps it's some kind of reflex response to a new release from a revered auteur. Sure the film looks great and the sets are marvellous, but any film suggesting that even if you are an irredeemable sadistic bitch-slapping psychopath, buy a girl some bling and she will sacrifice herself and her friends to save you, belongs with its victims in the south quarry. If you want to see a film about a symbiotic sadomasochistic relationship which is actually believable, check out the vastly superior Secretary.

This film is marketed as a thriller. Don't fall for it. Long and tedious this is anything but a thriller, and is a good example of why one should not try to make a full length feature based on a short story. The textbooks for university courses under the heading of "womens' studies" often claim that all sex is rape. Ang Lee seems out to prove this true. There are a lot of sex scenes. None of them have anything to do with love or tenderness. The main character's motivation for her actions at the end of the story is either obscure or absurd, depending on your viewpoint. Thumbs down from three of the four of us who attended.

MAJOR SPOILERS: Group decides to target evil traitor. Innocent girl forced to seduce him. He violently rapes her (which we are forced to watch). He's shown to be a sadisitic control freak, treats her like a *, she tells how he f*cks her until she bleeds and uses rough sex to dominate her. She does not want to continue in her act - wants the assassination done with. You see her SUFFERING through the (ANYTHING BUT erotic!) sex by staring at a gun she could use to kill him. Then suddenly evil bad guy buys her a GIANT SHINY DIAMOND.... and apparently that overcomes all patriotism, pride or self-esteem... so she tells him to run away. (we we supposed to believe she loved him???? Or was it really because it was a HUGE DIAMOND? Or did he finally just break her?) Evil bad guy escapes being killed and then rounds up all the conspirators in the group and they all die (including her). The end. So what exactly was the point of those 2.5 hours? We watched this poor woman whose family didn't want her & whose friends only used her - have sex and play mahojng and that's pretty much it. It gets 1 star for portraying old Shanghai which I enjoy seeing (my grandparents lived there) and 1 Tony Leung but otherwise it was a HORRIBLE disappointment. I have watched every Ang Lee movie and enjoyed all of them to varying degrees (the Civil War one wasn't so good). I expected much better from a great director, great actors and even the movie had great potential! So I am especially angry to have sat through that pointless waste of my time and supposedly 4 years of this woman's life.

I had been hyping myself up a great deal for Lust, Caution ever since I first heard of the project, so I'm glad to say that it did not disappoint. The film was a beautifully executed "espionage thriller," if you want to go with how it's being marketed to a broad audience. Steeped in the historically and culturally turbulent period of the second Sino-Japanese War, one must applaud Ang Lee for the dizzying array of minutiae he oversaw as director. Because of the nature of the film's protagonist Wang Jiazhi (played by a newcomer named Tang Wei - not shabby for your first feature) as an agent working under a second identity to ensnare a dangerous collaborationist (Tony Leung), all the scenes where Wang masquerades as the bourgeois Ms. Mai are fraught with a psychological tension, doubling with the political agenda at stake as well as her womanhood. She portrays both roles with heartbreaking deftness; a great casting choice if there ever was one. While not as physically alluring as some of her competitors for the role - Chinese language actresses including Zhou Xun and Shu Qi - I don't think anyone else could have pulled it off like Tang. She convincingly transforms herself from a naive college girl to coy seductress...and back again. The film struck quite a few personal nerves on my part too. While mainstream cinema should be, you know, self-sustaining or whatever you want to call it, there's really a lot to this movie that gets lost in subtitling to an extent, but also just in context and culture. Etiquette at the mah-jongg table; the omnipresent yet understated background of wartime occupation; political interests in the Chinese Civil War era; the weight of regional identity in dialects and interpersonal relationships. Tang Wei spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, and Shanghainese. My only thought is: What a hottie. The sex scenes are...something else. As echoed by most critics, they serve the story perfectly in capturing the urgency that Tang and Leung have in their precarious affair. There's a lot of violence in them, and it is through these carnal and savage acts that Tony Leung's Mr. Yee character is established as a very dangerous man. I won't spoil too much but there were several times when it became too difficult to watch. There were quite a few moments that made my heart flutter and eyes wobble. I'll just leave it at that.

This film is about a woman enticing a top ranking official in the occupying Japanese government, in order to assassinate him. I am very impressed by this film after just watching 5 minutes of it. The mahjong scene is very well made. Behind all the gossip, it has so much subtle tension. Everyone is secretly calculating another and planning their next move, both in the game and outside the game. Another striking thing that I noticed is that the panning motion of the camera. I am sure it is very tricky to get it right! A continuous shot of taking a piece of mahjong, then the hand of tiles, then throwing the unwanted one away. All done in one shot. It's really good camera work. There is a lot of complex emotions, both expressed and implied. For example, Wang Jiazhi's pain of having to give up her virginity is skilfully implied. Later, her pain of being intimate with Mr Yee is expressed in a rage. The psychological games in the subsequent parts is well portrayed. Wei Tang is masterful in playing her role. She portrays a wide variety of facial expression and bodily gestures so naturally and skilfully. Her power of seduction is undeniable. The surreal atmosphere that she creates when she is Mai Tai Tai is stunning. I have never heard of her before, and I hope she will get to play in more film in the future. Despite the film being two and a half hour long, it did not feel like it at all. In fact, I am glad that Ang Lee gives us enough time to appreciate the beauty of the film. The plot is gripping, and there is a lot to be pondered on. Men have to caution against lust, while for women, they may have to caution against something else. I will no reveal it here, watch the film to see for yourself. This film is a beautiful masterpiece. Just a side note, the sexuality in this film is so extremely the polar opposite compared to Ang Lee's last film "Brokeback Mountain". I find this very interesting.

Too long, too slow, too self-indulgent, and too brutal in its graphic sex scenes, Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" is a film not to be missed. Whatever misgivings there may be about it, this festival-winning film is a mesmerizing, rich experience. After 2 1/2 hours of being bombarded with a World War II love-and-hate story that's both exciting and dragging, chances are you will be still pinned to your seat, anxious to find out how it ends. The "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Brokeback Mountain" director has turned his attention to war-threatened Hong Kong in 1938 and Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942 (complete with a "safe Japanese zone"), seen through the eyes of a group of young Chinese resistance fighters. Based on the late Chinese-American writer Eileen Chang's short story of the same name, the focus of "Se, jie" is the relationship between Mr. Yee, head of the ruthless Japanese-collaborator security forces (played by Tony Leung, leading man of some 80 films) and a young actress with the resistance, played by Wei Tang, in her very first film role. They make a strange pair, both in the roles and as actors. Of the story - a cat-and-mouse game between the seductress/underground agent and the Japanese puppet/lord of life and death among the occupied - the less said the better in order to enjoy the movie. As actors, it's a veteran facing a new challenge and a novice who shows great skill and assurance. Leung has always been a brooding, symphathetic, worn-but-handsome presence, especially in his collaborations with director Wong Kai War. Here, for the first time, he plays not just a heavy, an ugly character, but a scary, unhappy, murderous man, literally a dark figure, lurking in the shadows. It's a great performance, fully realizing both aspects of the character: the monster and the man. Lee's love for the cinema classics is shown both in his use of excerpts from Hollywood greats (as the young actress frequents movie theaters) and in his creation of memorable images. This is a director with a painterly sensibility and the ability to transform objects into instantly memorable pictures. Never will you see mahjong again without recalling "Lust, Caution." Few of Lee's favorite classics can match the simple effectiveness of his final image here, of a sheet with slight depressions left by what rested on it shortly before: white on white, and yet meaningful and affecting. Leung and Tang fairly monopolize the screen, but the rest of the large cast is outstanding, led by San Franciscan Joan Chang as Yee's wife, and the vivid individual characters in the resistance, including the American-born Chinese pop star Leehom Wang.

With a sensational cast of actors and a tale of China in the late 1930's under occupation, LUST, CAUTION captures the cruelty of the period with a zest and cinematic journey which enraptures the audience in a tale of revenge-and love. Bravo, Ang Lee, for bringing to the screen such a lustrous tale of Chinese history in which you have also thrown in love scenes which bring to the film an element of cruelty and harshness which are reminiscent of the sexual pleasures of BASIC INSTINCT, but perfectly display the brutal character of Mr. Yee. The costumes, sets, lighting and the drama of the story make LUST, CAUTION a simply elegant journey with characters that jump off the screen with fury, passion and of course, love tinged with revenge. The film is long, but you can't take your eyes away from the film for one moment as you might miss the brilliant dialog and performances. LUST, CAUTION, makes you think of what it is to be occupied by a power that treats its captured denizens in a world of anger and bitterness and creates a world of hatred and revenge as we see in this intelligent and important film. May LUST, CAUTION continue to gain an audience as it heads into the Kudo season.