Get Out More................................Film Review

LUST, CAUTION (18, General Release)

14-01-2008

From the Ice Storm to Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has acquired a reputation for wringing great emotional depth from unlikely scenarios. But can he maintain that impressive track record with his latest release, set in World War Two Hong Kong? Paula Elenor munches the popcorn and gives her verdict.

Watching Ang Lee’s compelling Lust, Caution definitely comes with a caution: not for the faint-hearted! Already picking up prurient interest for its realistic and uncompromising sex scenes, the film is an unsettling exploration of resistance, courage & personal integrity in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the Second World War.

You can appreciate this film of many levels: it works well as a psychological thriller or as a spy or war film.

For me it worked as the best kind of historical drama, creating its own complex, totally convincing world rooted in real events.

It explores the impact war and occupation had on the lives of a generation of educated Chinese students exiled in Hong Kong – they expressed their patriotism and anti-Japanese fervour in impassioned amateur dramatics.

Flush with the incredible success of their plays, they decided to move onto more active forms of resistance: the entrapment and assassination of Mr Yee, a ruthless Chinese collaborator with the Japanese occupiers of huge chunks of China.

They are initially very successful, using their combined intellectual, financial and acting resources effectively to bring Yee to the very point when he could be assassinated. Good at amateur dramatics they may have been, but they were not so good at the real nasty & brutal business of spying and deception. Things go horrifyingly wrong.

However, three years later the group have another chance to finish the job, this time under the tutelage of a professional.

The best spy dramas explore the psychological dimensions of the day-to-day business of espionage and its effect on relationships and individual lives. They always explore the conflicting loyalties faced by individuals caught up in this world. Lust, Caution is no different; however I know of no other spy/war film that tackles the most intimate and personal effects of deception in such a non-sentimental and humane way.

Ang Lee is pretty confident in this territory as we have seen in Brokeback Mountain.

Unlike many a film with sex as a theme such as Last Tango in Paris or The Unbearable Lightness of Being (I call it The Unbearable Tedium of Watching ) Lust ,Caution is definitely NOT tedious.

To see a trailer, click here

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