Black & White World

Se, jie (Lust, Caution - 2007)

My expectations for this film were way off.  I make it a habit not to read reviews of movies I haven’t seen because I avoid spoilers, even small ones—in most cases, the less I know about a movie going into it, the better.  In this case, though, I might have done well to read up on it a little going in, because I was quite unprepared for how brutal the film would be.  I was expecting a “forbidden love” story, and instead found something quite different.

As disturbing as I found the film to be, I never looked away or considered for a moment turning it off—I had to find out how it turned out.  It is, like most movies made today, far too long—the first hour in particular drags on and on.  Scene after scene after scene of ladies playing Mah-jong.  But once the action picked up, it grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go, and maybe that was because I was lulled into a false sense of security by all the Mah-jong and this “forbidden love” storyline that I was certain was going to start any minute now.

The film is essentially an espionage thriller.  I didn’t make the connection to Hitchcock’s Notorious until thinking about the movie the next day—in the Hitchcock film it seemed so much more palatable for Ingrid Bergman to whore herself out to Claude Rains, maybe because Claude seemed like such a mensch: non-threatening, asexual.  Lust, Caution is a much more realistic and frightening take on the same basic plot.  Tony Leung is mesmerizing, quite unlike I’ve ever seen him before, and Wei Tang in an extraordinary film debut is unforgettable.  It’s not one I’m likely to watch again, but it stuck with me for a long time.