Director Ang Lee hits a new level of intimacy (and nastiness) in Lust Caution
What with the mostly restrained nature of the dude-on-dude action in Brokeback Mountain the sex scenes in Ang Lee’s latest film are bound to startle viewers. That’s not just because they’re explicit enough to have garnered Lust Caution a punitive NC-17 rating in the U.S. It’s because the scenes in question are the most tension-filled cruelest and yes hottest in the career of a director better known for portraying the subtlest ways of the heart than the motions of organs elsewhere.
“It drove me crazy” says Lee of the shooting of Lust Caution’s most private moments. “It’s very difficult to be so intimate. It’s against my nature to do it. I like to keep a polite distance from people to maintain a harmony to be subtle. But this is nasty ! Here the characters are ripping off layer by layer and it’s very painful. Somehow as an artist you feel like you have to do it.”
In an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival — where Lust Caution had its North American premi è re a few days before winning the Golden Lion at Venice an honour accorded his cowboy romance two years ago — the 52-year-old filmmaker admits that the scenes went further than he initially expected. That said he knew that he had to do justice to his source material a short story by Chinese writer Eileen Chang about a young woman (Tang Wei) who aids a cell of resistance fighters in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the Second World War by seducing a high-ranking official (Tony Leung) in the collaborationist government.
“It’s called Lust Caution after all” he says. “I knew I wanted to go deep down there and do something that hadn’t been done before though that doesn’t mean much when it comes to sex scenes. But then I got along with the actors and helped them get into the characters. Then I got greedy. I said to Tony ‘For a great actor like you if I don’t torture you I’m not paying enough respect to you!’ For Tang Wei she was just totally in character. She was able to do anything I asked.”
Tang — an actor and model who’s also a graduate of the directing program at Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama — also says that she felt more intimidated by the demands of her character than her director. “I felt pressure of course” she says “but that was from the character. It’s really special — she has a lot of parts and different looks and very strong emotions. It’s very rich. So that pressure existed because I was afraid I couldn’t express all the emotions she has.”
Lest all this leave the impression that Lust Caution is a non-stop shagfest it’s important to note that this is still very much an Ang Lee film with all the rich moments of languor and nuance that designation has come to imply in the years since his 1993 breakthrough hit The Wedding Banquet . Indeed the “nasty” reputation that preceded Lust Caution’s premi è re may have caused early viewers to lose patience with its slow-burn pacing which is instrumental in creating the level of tension in the film’s final hour. Its sumptuousness as a period piece may also call attention away from its unusual use of elements of melodrama and film noir. What Lee has done is adapt the vocabulary of Hollywood cinema of the ’40s to an Asian sensibility and locale — not for nothing does Lust Caution make nods to films such as Hitchcock’s Notorious a movie that explored matters of love and deceit to similarly disquieting effect.
“When I read the short story” says Lee “I thought it was kind of written like a movie already — even a film noir. Chang was a big movie fan — later in her career she wrote screenplays for Cathay Studio. So I suspect movies like Notorious affected her as well as the German film Dishonored . Casablanca was another influence except this story is its flipside.”
Tang’s character Wang Jiazhi is an avid moviegoer and the film strongly implies that she sees herself as one of the heroines she sees on screen. Lee agrees that Wang only feels truly herself “when she’s playing a character” which provokes troubling questions about the slippery nature of identity. “When she gets away from reality she ends up touching a truth in herself” says Lee. “It’s all about performance pretending that you’re the real deal and somehow becoming it. That’s the irony and what I think the movie is about.”
It’s hard not to wonder if the hostility with which the film has been received in some quarters is due to gender differences. Men and women may have very different takes on a heroine whose personality is in a constant state of flux as well as a story that explores the darkest recesses of female desire.
In Lee’s view Lust Caution has a particularly feminine if not exactly feminist sensibility. “This is a story by a very gutsy brilliant woman writer” he says. “I think the direction both the story and the movie go is pretty inevitable. I don’t purposely do this— I’m not a feminist since I’m a man! — but one aim is to deconstruct a historical patriarchal society. When a woman is not collaborating with or submitting to this it can be very destructive. And for us men seeing a story about this can be a very introspective experience — it’s a great way to examine who we are.”
Even so Lust Caution may take viewers further down than they’re willing to go. “And when you get down there” Lee notes “it’s pretty scary.”
