Lust, Caution
The main reason why I ended up watching this film was because of Joan Chen who plays the utterly unimportant wife of the main character. She works pretty well in this role, but really, she didn’t have to do very much.
Instead, the main female character is this youngster upon whom the entire story is lying on. (Of course there also is Tony Leung, but not even his brilliancy could have saved the film if the main actress was bad.) And what can I say – she is pretty amazingly cast for this role as well. I don’t think I can imagine any of the established actresses to properly play this role simply for the reason that there is this little bit of innocence and tragedy, and this huge amount of sex that comes with it. I just can’t see Zhang Ziyi do a sex scene like that in any believable way.
Awhile ago, I read an article on how Wong Kar-Wai thinks that the main characters from “In the Mood for Love” are perverse and screwed up. (He probably did not use these words, but it’s close enough.) I was a little surprise because ultimately I thought they were very normal and viewed their restraint as something quite high and powerful. I can probably get behind the idea that there is something wrong with those characters, completely obsessing about this love they cannot attain. But “In the Mood for Love” completely pales next to “Lust, Caution” when it comes to perversion. I’m not talking about the sex scenes; they are rather bad but it’s sex, not violence. I don’t think super-bloody slashings happen in real life, but that kind of sex does happen in real life, and what goes against showing something like that in a film? The perversion in the film is in the relationship of the characters. The first time the guy ever sleeps with Tang Wei’s character, he practically rapes her violently. And by violent I mean he rips her clothes, throws her onto the bed, whips her with his belt, ties her hands with the belt and then takes her from behind. There is no way a sane woman in her right mind would proceed onto having a relationship with this man unless she is masochistic. Indeed the main characters did not wish for such a treatment in the first place, she slept with him because of her political motivation to assassinate him. This is almost a plot hole, because if she cannot convince him that she wants that kind of sex, she is practically confessing that she has other motives for sleeping with him, i.e. trying to kill him. But it was not that way, and it could just as well be that the main character was so big of an asshole that he assumed she’d like it. How screwed up is that?
There was another thing which is almost even worse – there is another scene in which the guy tells the story of how he had to torture another man who he knew from before, they went to school together and he could not stand having to torture and kill him. But then he produced this image of how that man in front of him gets on top of the female main character, so he got enraged in jealousy that he started hitting the man and killed him. How unbelievably sick is that?
There is yet another scene in which they are in this Japanese restaurant, and Tony Leung’s character tells her how he hates Japanese songs, because they sound like scared, crying animals. Indeed the Japanese are portrayed in a horrible fashion in the film (probably not too far from how it really is), and all of their atrocities are explained with “fear”. It was the one scene in which the unusual circumstances of life during WWII comes to light the most clearly in this film and it made me wonder – if the aggressors are so bad, isn’t it even worse to collaborate with them? Certainly it’s a tough situation, but really, the mere concept of opportunism is perhaps more perverse than anything else. You are not really aggressor, you are not really victim, it’s the something in between that makes it so despicable. Passive-aggressiveness, that’s pretty much it.
The last scene I would like to mention is how the key of the entire film relies upon a… diamond. She realizes his love when she saw what a beautiful ring he bought for her. Can a diamond, no matter how large, possibly ever be the crucial display of a man’s love? In that respect, I am all with Nora – I want that men would be willing to give anything I would have be willing to give them, and if it’s something as ridiculous as “honour”. I should a poll asking what is the sickest part of the film – the SM sex scene, the torture story or the diamonds.
I am almost shocked at how the film reflects myself. It’s the incredibly eroticism of qipao, the mix of Chineseness and Westerness in 1940’s Shanghai and finally, the female main character. She’s a young student, extremely willing to learn, passionate about love and – to some degree – politics and she made the two most important decisions in her life because of her love for (two different) men. Smart yet emotional to the point of being masochistic and suicidal, I don’t think such a character exists anywhere else in film world. I shouldn’t even have to mention that her favorite hobby is to watch movies. She could have been me, and that makes (this horribly perverted!) movie even stranger. It took me awhile to reflect upon it, I needed a little distance from it.
All in all, I don’t think Ang Lee reaches the greatness of Wong Kar-Wai with this film, and in general, I thought it was a weaker film than “Brokeback Mountain”, both in terms of the story and directing. But it was definitely worth a look, and it hit me hard.