Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is supposedly an espionage thriller but that is very much a misnomer.  Mainly because it is only ever intermittently thrilling and it paints the picture of a different movie altogether.  Espionage elements aside, Lee’s film is a mostly lifeless bore of a movie that limps to a conclusion .

Based on the novella by Eileen Chang, adapted into screenplay form by James Schamus and Hui-Ling Wang, Lee’s film sets itself in Hong Kong and Shanghai circa 1938 and 1942 respectively, amidst the Japanese occupation during WWII.  Wei Tang plays a young drama student pulled in by her classmates into a daring assassination plot against a Japanese collaborator (played by Tony Leung).  She picks up a fake identity and ingratiates herself into his life and eventually becomes her mistress.  The film follows our young heroine as she puts herself completely into her role and then begins to fall in love with the man she is supposed to set up for murder.

This film was an incredible disappointment to me as I really enjoy Ang Lee’s work.  The characters are lifeless and dull.  The film is of such a singular simple premise and focus that it becomes a chore to sit through the entire two and half hour run time without any character to feel latched on to.  There are intermittent scenes of suspense and some solid performances that keep certain stretches afloat, but nothing that keeps the viewer involved in the story.

It’s a beautifully composed film that sheds light on a place during World War II that wasn’t completely familiar to me.  It’s a wonderful sense of place that Lee creates here and it’s the film’s defining characteristic that really made it felt somewhat worthwhile.  Unfortunately, the characters are such bores and stretch any kind of reality that it’s hard to sit and watch.

There are aspects of this film that reminded me of the great Alfred Hitchcock film Notorious, most notably the latter half of the movie when Tang is asked to resume her relationship with Leung’s Mr. Yee.  The man asking her to do this is the fiery, attractive classmate that convinced her to go along with the plot in the first place, who as the audience can tell from glances and brief cut-aways, share intimate feelings with each other.  That is where the similarities end, both in narrative and quality.  While Hitchcock built the relationship between the handler and the spy, the film focuses on the spy and her target.  Here the film could have found interesting ways of discovering this relationship and showing the effects on the handler as well, but Lee doesn’t seem to care for this aspect of the story.

In that sense, there is a Hitchcock feel to the building of suspense in certain scenes, but whereas Hitchock would pay things off and build interesting character relationships so well, Lee lets things simmer and eventually die, including audience interest.  The relationships are scarcely given attention to and there is barely any character momentum to lead to character actions that lead to its conclusion.  Lee seems to feel that the explicit, NC-17 sex scenes are enough to show how much in love they have fallen, but there is little follow up.  The characters never feel real and it hurts the central relationships that are supposed to drive the story forward.  The characters are so cold and frigid toward each other that one wonders if this was a purposeful choice by Lee and that, if it was, that he’s gone too far in that direction to give the audience absolutely no feeling towards any of the characters.

The performances are quite good but they are given so little and feel so misused, that it’s hard to find any moments where they are given to shine, with very few exceptions.  The students that originally set out on this assassination plot are given just the barest hints of character development and seem to be brought in towards the end of the film just to show that, yes, they are still around.

The film’s greatest enemy is its pacing which utterly kills any momentum that might have been able to garner any interest.  The last half hour or so, things actually begin to ratchet up but it’s too little that comes far too late.  There is far too little in an otherwise overlong, over-dull, attempt at Hitchockian and romantic intrigue.  The entire endeavor falls flat and its too bad because the story given is quite good.  Within this unruly bore, is a good film waiting to burst out but unfortunately, Lee was unable to bring that sense of emotion and unruly passion that made Brokeback Mountain such an amazing work.

Today I wanted to talk a little about angles and how sometimes, something is perfect depending on how you see it.

From 2007’s Lust, Caution.

The genesis for that was going to be (and is now) me talking about how Ang Lee’s gorgeous and seductive film, Lust, Caution. It’s a beautifully erotic film, and stars Tony Leung, the man who is probably the lead actor in every single Chinese adult film.

Not adult as in porno (despite the evidence to the contrary in these images from Lust, Caution), but adult as in mature and erotic films for adults. Watch a film starring Tony Leung and you’ll see what I mean. And not just that, but you’ll see one of the most still, most restrained and classy actors in cinema anywhere in the world.

Tony Leung and Wei Tang in Lust, Caution.

This is how he describes himself: “I am very restrained, very suppressed, very quiet. I don’t like to talk too much because I don’t know what to do in front of an audience. Actually, I don’t know how to communicate with others because of my background and I am scared.” It’s not surprising to hear him say that since his screen presence is a disarming sense of dangerous confidence mixed with wounded masculinity.

From Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046.

Also, he – Tony Leung Chiu-Wai - apparently is known by the nickname of “Little Tony,” to distinguish himself from “Big Tony,” who is Tony Leung Ka-Fai. For some reason, I always assumed it was Chiu-Wai in The Lover, but it was Ka-Fai.

“Every once in a while a train leaves to a place where lost memories are remembered. But no one has ever returned from 2046.”

“…except me.”

If you haven’t seen Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love yet, which is one of the most agonizingly beautiful love stories ever, then I suggest you put down your internet and go find yourself a viewing of it immediately. There is no nudity in the film, no sex scenes, and yet it’s so erotic that you’ll ache from longing. And maybe that longing will be satisfied by it’s sequel (of sorts), 2046.

Wong Kar-Wai is a brilliant director and thanks to his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, you can literally take any scene from either of those (or any of his films, honestly) and just pluck them right off the screen and hang them on your wall.

Tomorrow or the next day, we’ll talk about the angles (you’ll see what I mean). But tonight is me suggesting that you find yourself In The Mood For Love as soon as possible. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in that film are real, beautiful cinema at it’s finest. Go see what I mean.

In 2005 I spent three months attached to the East China Normal University in Shanghai as an Asialink resident. Perhaps fortuitously, we didn’t end up living in one of the newer parts of the city, but in an apartment at the top of an alley house not far from the corner of Huaihai Lu and Shanxi Nanlu in the old French Concession.

The dodgy wiring and rats aside, it was a fascinating place to stay, not least because it gave me the opportunity to get to know some of the last remnants of Old Shanghai. For all its well-deserved reputation for criminality and vice, Old Shanghai was also the site of an incredibly fertile collision between European and Chinese modernity. This collision gave birth to writers such as Shi Zhecun, and Liu Na’ou (I’d probably also lump Eileen Chang in there as well, since although her work concentrates on the years of the Occupation, and was published in the 1940s, it exists in the shadow of the Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s she grew up in), nurtured political radicals such as Mao and his wife, and most visibly these days, resulted in the peculiarly Shanghainese fusion of European and Chinese architecture that can be seen in the remaining pieces of the pre-1989 city.

'Alley (Yangshuo Lu, looking north), 2006', © Greg Girard, 2006

Even in 2005, when I was there, these remnants of the old city were vanishing fast. The pace of change in China is (or was, until recently) dizzying, and the Chinese have little interest in preserving what they see as the European city (Shanghai may have been the site of the most potent encounter between Europe and China, but it is also, for that very reason, seen by many Chinese as a symbol of the West’s exploitation of China: not for nothing were the towering buildings of Pudong built straing back across the river at the symbols of European power and wealth that dominate the Bund).

The process has created a city which is very much in flux. Buildings, streets, even whole neighbourhoods seem to vanish overnight, swept away without trace. The results can be startling, shocking, and just plain disconcerting: my partner and I often ate in a restaurant a few blocks from our home; a few weeks after we left a friend who’d eaten there with us was back in Shanghai, and he discovered that not only the restaurant was gone, but everything within a radius of a few hundred metres had also been demolished, apartment blocks already rising on the site.

'Fuzhou Lu Mailboxes, 2005', © Greg Girard, 2006

One of the ironies of this process is that it is largely undocumented. Images of Shanghai tend to fall into one of two categories, seeking to capture either the gleaming modernity of the new China, or the elegance and mystery of Old Shanghai.

In a very real sense this is a reflection of a more profound double-vision that afflicts most Western interest in Shanghai. Whether in guidebooks or literature, Western eyes seem unable to see that there are other Shanghais lurking beneath the surface of the city, histories and realities laid down during the Occupation and the Cultural Revolution which exist alongside the more comfortable images of Old Shanghai’s glitter and decadence and New Shanghai’s shining skyscrapers and designer boutiques.

'600 Things, 2005', © Greg Girard, 2006

These questions are on my mind because I’ve been working on a non-fiction piece about the city, but they’ve also reminded me about the one book I’ve ever seen that seems to me to catch something of the accretive nature of Shanghai as a city, its sense of layered history, which is Greg Girard’s splendid Phantom Shanghai. The images in Greg’s book show a city in flux, a place where the past is being gradually wiped away, yet they also show the many, often enigmatic, traces its past has left. Somewhere – and it may be in Denton Welch’s marvelously strange Maiden Voyage, but I can’t find the reference – there’s a wonderful description of the way Chinese cities and towns often seem to be constructed out of detritus, repaired and repurposed, yet still resembling nothing so much as a conglomeration of offcasts and broken things, and there’s something of this in the images in Phantom Shanghai, as well as a sense of the almost surreal light of the city at night, the reflected glow of the pollution and the neon. But there’s also a sense of the ghostliness of the city, of the way its seems haunted by its past, and by the simultaneous closeness and irretrievability of that past.

With Greg Girard’s permission I’ve reproduced several images from the book in this post, and you can see more by visiting the Monte Clark Gallery website, or Greg Girard’s website (where you can also read William Gibson’s introduction) but I really do urge anyone with an interest in Shanghai to buy the book, – it’s a remarkable document of a city in transition, and of a world which is vanishing even as we speak.

Break text

Lust, Caution is the title both of a short story collection by Eileen Chang, and of the first story in that collection. It is also, of course, a recent film by Ang Lee (one I haven’t seen as yet, my views on Ang Lee’s work are mixed though I understand this one is pretty good). Eileen Chang was a 20th Century Shanghainese author, who lived in Shanghai until the 1950s and then moved to the US to avoid increasing problems with the Maoist regime.

The collection includes five stories (of between 20 and 40 pages apiece), each set during the Japanese occupation of China, and each an examination of love, sorrow, disappointment, compromise and the tension between tradition and the new. These are, other than the title story, small tales of ordinary people and the quiet concerns of their lives. It is also a collection which mostly puts the perspectives of female characters to the fore, in a period in which women’s choices were often circumscribed by tradition and relatively inflexible gender roles.

Oddly, each story has a different translator, though there is one overall editor happily it did not feel that style was varying too wildly one to the next. That editor, and translator of the title story, is Julia Lovell who I note also translated I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen which I hope to read at some point.

Other than in Lust, Caution itself, these stories use the occupation, war and the dramatic events of early 20th Century China as backdrop, a cause of increasing food shortages or rising cloth prices. Characters are impacted by great events, but they do not as a rule participate in them, they simply carry on and are concerned with work and weddings and making do.

Which makes it all sound pretty dull, and indeed Chang was heavily criticised at times for writing works which were essentially quotidian in scope and for ignoring the wider dramas of wartime China. This is, in my view, a quite misguided criticism, as what Chang does do which I think is far more interesting is show how people continue to live in interesting times and how the personal details of our lives ultimately are of more meaning to us than the grand events which may occur around us.

Of the stories, one deals with a young student who has been infiltrated into the bed of an occupation government official in order to betray him to his assassins, one the conversations of women sitting in a massage clinic’s waiting room, one preparations for a wedding between a young woman of good birth and a groom from a nouveau riche family, another an evening in a domestic servant’s life and her difficult relations with her young son, the final the strained relationship between a younger (though still middle aged) woman and her older and richer husband. Other than the first then, these are characters which Chang’s original readers would instantly have recognised from their own lives, people of a type that her readers might well themselves know or be related to.

As Chang is not a plot driven author (even Lust, Caution is more about the student spy protagonist’s internal debate about whether to betray her lover to his assassins or not), her work stands or falls on her prose and the skill of her characterisation, and it is here that she shines. Chang is a master of brief but telling description, of packing a wealth of information about a person into a sentence or two. In the opening story, Jiazhi is a pretty young student radical who has become involved with a group of fellow students intent on resisting the Japanese occupation. She is chosen to become the lover of an official in the collaborationist government, but when she successfully makes contact with him and goes back to celebrate with her fellow conspirators they realise a key problem in their plan:

“Instead, a quiet gradually fell over the assembled company. There was whispering in a couple of corners, and secretive, tittering laughter; laughter she had heard before. They had been talking it over behind her back for some time, she realised.

‘Apparently, Liang Runsheng is the only one who has any experience,’ Lai Xiujin, the only other girl in the group, told her.

Liang Runsheng.

Of course, he was the only one who had ever been inside a brothel.”

And so we see how young they are, how inexperienced, how amateurish. They have planned a honey trap, but they are all virgins save one and his experience is born simply of a trip or two to a brothel.

Jiazhi is a romantic, she finds herself part of the world of the government elite, with their flashing diamond rings, heavy gold chains fashionable due to their great expense in wartime, among mature women who endlessly play mahjong with clacking tiles and biting gossip. She finds herself attracted to Mr Yi, the official she seduces, and she is caught between her desire to fulfil her mission, her loyalty to her group, and the emotion she finds herself feeling for the vastly more experienced Mr Yi.

Like much Chinese fiction, Lust, Caution is not a happy tale. Jiazhi for all her status as a spy and seducer is an innocent, caught in a world much more sophisticated than her own. The observation of her moods is cool and precise, the description of the languorous air in a downmarket jewellers to which she lures Mr Yi to planned ambush is beautifully drawn as is the light it sheds on the relationship between adulterer and lover, the rules of seduction and the gifts it is appropriate for Mr Yi to give and when it is appropriate to give them. This is a world in which assignations are known and accepted, in which a lover will be bought jewellery while the affair is in bloom and given an apartment by way of parting gift, a world in which lust and caution may each play a part but in which love is not expected to.

My personal favourite story of the collection was not, however, Lust, Caution itself. I preferred the second and third tales, In the Waiting Room and Great Felicity. In the Waiting Room simply records the passing conversation of women awaiting their appointments in a massage clinic, one seeking to jump the queue, another complaining of her many problems in life, ordinary women having an ordinary conversation of a sort that could happen in almost any queue in almost any place or time.

Again, descriptions are brief but beautifully telling, the daughter of the couple who run the clinic wears every day the same dress of red and black checked imitation wool:

“so big it was baggy on her, and a pair of homemade, grey cloth shoes. She had a lot of siblings, so she wouldn’t get any pretty clothes until she had a likely match – but since she didn’t have anything pretty to wear, she couldn’t get a match. She was trapped in a vicious circle, doomed to spend her blooming years in wistful longing: no young woman, no matter how clever, could break her way out of a dress like that.”

That last line there, “no young woman, no matter how clever, could break her way out of a dress like that.” is I think marvellous, pitiless yet sympathetic, capturing the quiet despair of a live absent meaningful choices or opportunities, a life determined by society and tradition within certain tightly bound constraints.

Similarly, Chang’s description of the masseur and his wife is skilful, as this little vignette shows:
“Pang Songling came out and washed his hands at the washstand near the door. He was wearing a jacket and pants made of soft silk, dull blue in colour. He propped one foot on his daughter’s chair, picked up the soup plate, took his cigarette from his mouth, handed it to his wife, and started to eat. Mrs Pang smoked the cigarette and then, when he had finished eating, returned it to him. Neither one said a word.”

We see the relationship between the couple, long established and passionless, we note Pang Songling’s clothes as opposed to those of his unfortunate daughter, whose chair he uses to rest his foot on. In that one paragraph we have nested relationships, a whole story of a family caught in one moment.

Chang is tremendous at portraying frustration, petty injustice, the chafing of a life which is not happy but in which the disappointments are too small for it to be tragic. In Great Felicity, the mother of the groom (Mrs Lou) is a woman of humble origins whose lack of social graces constantly undermines her and whose family all in different ways mock and belittle her. Chang shows how her characters betray themselves, how the narratives they tell themselves may not quite reflect the realities they inhabit. At one point Mrs Lou wants to answer her husband back for an unfair accusation:

“Suddenly it all welled up within her and she wanted to answer back: ‘if we have been treating you badly here at home, then don’t come back! I’m sure you have another woman outside. That’s why you keep finding fault with things at home – this won’t do, that won’t do.’ Then she remembered that she was going to be a mother-in-law soon and swallowed her words. She put her shoulders back and clattered to the bathroom where she gargled noisily, swishing the water around in her mouth, then spitting it out with a vengeance. Whenever Mrs Lou was angry and wanted to cry, she always channelled her impulse into bluff and hearty action – letting it all out.”

The evident irony being of course that Mrs Lou has not acted at all and has let nothing out, she has simply swallowed her anger and disappointment as one feels she must have many times before. Later in the same scene:

“She gazed at herself, at her pale, stolid, spreading cheeks – she couldn’t even articulate to herself her own misery. The eyebrows were drawn together, always frowning, but her expression said only, ‘Oh bother! Bother!’ and said nothing of her misery.”

Chang’s stories do not have a sole narrative perspective, we see overlapping lives which impact each other but which fail to really communicate. The young couple are modern and manipulate their parents into buying them better wedding gifts by using their own traditional views against them, the husband pursues his social advancement, Mrs Lou muddles along laughing at jokes she doesn’t understand. Again, Chang is pitiless yet sympathetic, exposing Mrs Lou’s foibles and failings, but showing compassion for her at the same time.

Chang has a talent for capturing uncomfortable conversations, unspoken family resentments, incomprehension between generations, the different pulls of modernity (much of it in the form of Western influences) and tradition (concubinage for example), the constant tension between materialism and sentiment. In a sense, as an author she is a miniaturist, capturing the everyday in small scenes or brief descriptions, working on a tiny canvass but with telling detail.

At times, particularly in Lust, Caution itself, I did struggle to differentiate some characters (which may have been intentional in that case) as different women of similar classes came to merge together somewhat. A curious failing given how accomplished the characterisation was generally. However, overall I found this a rewarding and interesting read, and more importantly for my own tastes I found it true at a level that much fiction struggles to achieve in its depiction of ordinary people facing ordinary challenges. Penguin have also published a collection entitled Love in a Fallen City (a tremendously Changian title in my view) which I intend to pick up and a full novel is promised. Having read Lust, Caution, I have every intention of reading as much of Chang’s work as Penguin cares to translate and publish.

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/showbook.php?id=0141034386 (though note the cover on the copy I have is taken from Ang Lee’s film, bit of a shame really as I prefer the black and white shot on the cover I link to here).

Titolo originale: Se, Jie - Lust, Caution

Regia: Ang Lee

Cast: Tony Leung, Joan Chen, Lee-Hom Wang, Tang Wei,
Wang Leehom

Distribuzione: Bim, Cina, USA, 2007

Guarda il trailer

Shangai, anni 40. La Cina è occupata dall’esercito giapponese e la giovane studentessa universitaria Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), entra a far parte di una giovane compagnia teatrale formata da un  gruppo di ragazzi desiderosi di aiutare in qualche modo la Resistenza cinese contro l’occupazione nemica. Il loro obiettivo è uccidere Yee (Tony Leung), un potente e spietato collaborazionista. Proprio Wong Chia Chi ha il compito di introdursi nell’ambiente del signor Yee, diventando inizialmente amica di sua moglie e poi sua amante. Ma tra i due nasce qualcosa di vero, e se la ragione dice alla ragazza di agire fedelmente ai compagni della Resistenza, il suo cuore va in un’altra direzione…

 A due anni dalla vittoria del Leone d’oro a Venezia con “I segreti di Brokeback Mountain“, Ang Lee bissa il successo con questa pellicola, che racconta una storia d’amore complessa e travagliata tra sentimento e lotta politica per la liberazione, tratta dall’omonimo racconto della scrittrice cinese Eileen Chang.

Il regista dimostra ancora una volta tutto il suo talento, coadiuvato dalla bellissima fotografia di Rodrigo Prieto e dalla interpretazione appassionata della rivelazione Tang Wei, e di Tony Leung, uno degli attori orientali più famosi e apprezzati, considerato il Clark Gable d’Oriente.

La loro storia è coinvolgente, fatta di soprusi, segreti, ma straordinariamente vera. La timida studentessa universitaria che vediamo a inizio pellicola,  per amore di Kuan Yu Min, leader del gruppo teatrale animato da ingenuo patriottismo, si trasforma nella benestante moglie di un fantomatico e misterioso importatore e riesce a conquistare tutti, a partire dalla moglie di Yee e dalle sue amiche fino a raggiungere il suo vero obiettivo, il signor Yee, che le è stato descritto come un uomo malvagio e senza scrupoli, nemico della Resistenza, terribile aguzzino.

Il pubblico perpepisce e vive i dubbi che si insinuano sempre più nella mente della ragazza, man mano che il diabolico piano di eliminazione prosegue.

Le scene di sesso molto esplicite e di cui si è parlato molto, sono funzionali allo svolgimento e alla comprensione della storia, in quanto rappresentano l’espressione del tormento interiore della ragazza e permettono di cogliere i sentimenti ambigui e contraddittori del signor Yee, anche lui combattuto tra la sua scorza di uomo impenetrabile, violento e i suoi sentimenti per la ragazza.

Come fare a conciliare amore e libertà politica se l’uno porta all’automatica esclusione dell’altro?

Questo è l’interrogativo che Ang Lee porta avanti fino a una conclusione che di fatto lascia al pubblico grande libertà di interpretazione.

In definitiva un altro capolavoro di questo grande regista,  ritratto di un’epoca le cui vicende storiche fanno da sfondo all’incontro/scontro di due personalità complesse e contraddittorie.

Conclusione: Consigliatissimo.

Voto: 8

servizio di LUCA SVIZZERETTO

(tratto da Nuovo Civitavecchia Oggi di sabato 22 dicembre 2007) - ‘Lussuria – Seduzione e tradimento’ è il nuovo film di Ang Lee, il regista premio Oscar che ha diretto ‘I segreti di Brokeback Mountain’ e ‘La tigre e il dragone’. Avvincente thriller erotico di spionaggio che racconta il destino del cuore di una donna, il film è tratto da un racconto della scrittrice cinese Eileen Chang (da noi meglio nota come Zhang Ailing), ed è interpretato dall’icona del cinema asiatico Tony Leung accanto all’esordiente Tang Wei.
Shanghai, 1942. Prosegue la dura occupazione giapponese di questa città, nel corso della seconda guerra mondiale. La signora Mak, una donna ricca e sofisticata, entra in un caffé, fa una telefonata, e poi si siede ad aspettare. Ricorda…
…come molti anni prima è cominciata la sua storia, nel 1938, in Cina. Non è ancora la signora Mak, ma la timida Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei). Mentre infuria la seconda guerra mondiale, è stata lasciata sola dal padre, fuggito in Inghilterra. Al primo anno di università, incontra uno studente, Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom). Kuang ha messo in piedi una compagnia teatrale allo scopo di tenere alto lo spirito patriottico della gente. Nel ruolo di prima attrice della nuova compagnia, Wong capisce di aver trovato la sua strada, di essere capace di commuovere ed emozionare il pubblico – e Kuang. Il giovane convince un gruppetto di studenti a mettere in atto un piano radicale e ambizioso per assassinare un grosso collaborazionista dei giapponesi, il signor Yee (Tony Leung). Ogni studente ha una parte da interpretare: Wong sarà la signora Mak, che prima conquisterà la fiducia di Yee diventando amica di sua moglie (Joan Chen), poi intreccerà una relazione con lui. Wong subirà una trasformazione profonda, esteriore e interiore, mentre il piano procede secondo quanto stabilito, finché un fatale imprevisto non la costringerà alla fuga.
Shanghai, 1941. Quando ancora non si vede la fine dell’occupazione giapponese, Wong – che nel frattempo è emigrata a Hong Kong – cerca di tirare avanti. Con sua grande sorpresa, però, Kuang rientra nella sua vita: ora fa parte della resistenza organizzata, e torna ad arruolarla nel ruolo della signora Mak, in un nuovo tentativo di uccidere Yee, che – come direttore del servizio segreto collaborazionista – ha assunto un ruolo ancora più importante all’interno del governo fantoccio. Riprendendo il suo vecchio ruolo, e avvicinandosi sempre di più alla sua pericolosa preda, Wong scopre che la sua identità si sta incrinando…
Quello di Ang Lee è un film di spionaggio puro e duro, nel più tipico stile anni 80, con ricostruzioni storiche precise e dettagliate. Quello che colpisce senza alcun dubbio, almeno nella versione originale, presentata alla 64esima edizione del Festival di Venezia dove ha vinto il Leone d’oro, è la presenza di scene di sesso molto esplicite, al limite dell’hard, che però inserite nel contesto di un’opera molto elegante e ben fatta, non sfigurano ma anzi divengono a loro volta parte fondamentale della storia.
Bravi gli attori, che sanno curare i loro personaggi e si intuisce siano guidati dalla mano sapiente dell’ormai esperto Ang Lee.
Un film che merita la visione. Non sappiamo dire se sia davvero il migliore dei film presentati a Venezia quest’anno ma senza dubbio dietro le quinte c’è un lavoro importante che non può non essere ammirato e ricordato.

Eileen Chang has become a serious addiction to me, by choice of course. Her life has been a rich tapestry of the most grandiose and elite of New China between 1910 and 1950.

Written in the Chinese language (which I trudge through during the past week with straining eye) by a scholar from Taiwan, this book draws on the letters of correspondences between Eileen Chang and her friends and her endearing aunt, historical records, old literary publications, memoir and scrapbook to incorporate biographical details into a fictionalized account of the legendary writer. Her personal history trickles into her own works, and this book thoughtfully draws on Chang’s sharpest and most piercing lines to establish a conversation with this contemporary literati who, despite her political apathy, shines into ordinary, but complex, conflicted individuals whose frustration and helplessness amount to a strong social realism.

The book follows Eileen Chang’s birth in 1920 all the way to her moving to the United States. She passed away in her Los Angeles home in 1995. Her marriage with Hu Lan Cheng, with whom she painfully broke off relation after the war upon discovery of his adultery, dealt her a heavy blow and this unhealed wound has transmuted an air of toughness and skepticism in her later works. A peek into her prose will reveal the cruelty of heart, caprice, unpredictability and mortality of love. She is tough but also unrelenting. Growing up in Shanghai on the heels of the revolution that overthrew Qing Dynasty, Eileen Chang was raised at a time when Western architecture was erected among Chinese landscapes. It was the time when the Chinese who clang on to their traditions opened up to the bustle of commercial activities made possible by ceasing land to the French.

Chang was privileged to grow up under this aura of new materialism. Captured in her quick-witted and acrimonious writings are what at the time impagined and threatened to subvert traditions and values of Old China: Cosmetics, coffee shops, newspaper, movie theater, gas stove, fashion shows, Quaker oatmeal, and panty hose. Under the influence of her mother, who was bold to divorce her opium-addict father and went abroad to pursue fine arts, Eileen took up serious writing–writing no about national issues but social and domestic satires that implicate, for example, her emotionally sterile father and the manipulative step-mother. Their cruelty toward her had only fueled her conviction to retaliate, by living a better life, by ridding them of her life. Her writings not only affords reality of the sense but also becomes a riposte to her pent-up repulsion and humiliation.

To me Eileen Chang is a legend because as a writer a tinge of snobbery is not a bad attribute. Snobbery in the sense of having certain expectation and standard. Whether in her characters or in her life Eileen Chang exacts a very brave happiness and sanguinity, something that is so impalpable that only through her writings can I perceive.

(Dear English readers, please scroll down to find the ‘click’ for English translation)

终于看了色.戒。

看着戏时，感觉是，戏内戏外，（人生也是？），开拍了，戏就要演下去。所以，王佳芝一直演下去….就如戏中冷酷无情和有点假道义的吴先生说的：一去就没得回头了…..觉得，这部电影将这种复杂的感觉拍得很好。坐在戏院中看戏时，觉得王佳芝有选择的余地，只是她没让自己选择。是爱国？是为民处害？是情欲？是真爱？是走投无路？是要取邝裕民好感？是报复？难说。

我喜欢打麻将的几幕。李安拍出了张爱玲的神笔，那几个阔太太也演出了张爱玲笔下的人物。 如：那个演马太太的苏岩，那个有点敌意，有点怀疑王佳芝和易先生之间的关系的眼神，虽一闪而过，却拿捏准确。我最要赞的是陈冲！她的每个眼神，每个微笑, 每个举动都很入神。她洞悉一切, 她处事泰若。

赞了，我现在要在鸡蛋里挑一挑骨头。坦白说，我觉得有些戏份拍得有些夸张，甚至有点好笑，如：“中国不能亡”，和“我恨你 – 我相信”这两幕。我不知该哭或笑。有些戏拍得太‘白’了，少了神髓，少了震撼。 如：结局时，易先生手下向他报告那幕就不必了。

汤唯嘛，新人来说，已很不错了。只是，有些时候我还是觉得好像少了什么。梁朝伟的演技精沾内炼有目共赌，不用多说。只是有一幕有点牵强 – 他哭的时候。不知是他的错手，还是李安的。

读张爱玲的原著，或看李安的电影，不可没留意到钻戒。故事开始时，钻戒在麻将台上闪闪发亮。故事结尾时，那粒鸽子蛋大的钻戒也在妖艳地闪闪发亮。前后呼应，绝！真的很讽刺。唉！女人真笨，见了那粒钻戒. 就决定放弃一切….

Finally, I went to watch Lust.Caution yesterday.

When I was watching Lust Caution, all I could feel was, once you have decided to perform, you have to continue because the show has to go on…. (same with life ?) ….That’s why Wang Jia Zhi in the movie continues to perform, continue to perform at her best ability as the woman who determined to seduce Mr Yee. Just like the cruel and pretentious head of resistance group said : once you decided, there is no turning back…..I find this movie able to portray this struggle quite well. I sat in the cinema, kept thinking there were moments when Wang Jiazhi could have a choice, however, she does not give herself opportunities to choose. Because of patriotism? because of true love? because want to save the ordinary people? because of lust ? because there is no other choices? because want to attract Kuang Yuming’s attention? because want to revenge? It is hard to say or pinpoint.

I like the mahjong scenes the most. Ang Li has successfully translated Eileen Chang’s (Zhang Ailing) original work into big screen, and the few actress have successfully portrayed the characters in Chang’s work. For example, Su Yan as Mrs Ma who has that subtle hostile look towards Wang Jiazhi, and her suspicion of Wang Jiazhi and Mr Yee’s relationship. It is so subtle and brief but you could feel it clearly. The one I wanted to praise the most is Joan Chen. Throughout the film, her smiles, her words, and everything else are so captivating. She is the woman who knows everything in the movie and yet she able to hold it all together neatly.

Ok, I have given some complements and now I want to share some disappointments on this film. Frankly, I think there are some scenes are a bit over the top, sometimes, unfortunately have become quite amusing. For example, the scene when everyone stands up in the theatre and say ‘China can’t be destroyed’ and the scene when the couple say ‘I hate you – Yes, I believe’. Well, I nearly laughed in cinema. There are also some scenes I think are not necessary. For example, at the ending when Mr Yee’s subordinate reporting to him about the arrested. I personally find the scenes have lessen the dramatic and intense feelings, also soften Mr Yee’s cruelness. With regard to Tang Wei, I think her performance is quite good as a newcomer. However, I have to admit that there are some scenes I feel she is kind of lacking something that I can’t pinpoint. Tony Leong’s performance is superb as always, but I do not like the scene when he cries. Don’t know it is his mistake oo Ang Lee’s.

Last but not least, whether you read Eileen Chang’s original work or watch Ang Lee’s film, you can’t miss the shining (sometimes you can see the devil shines) diamond rings on the mahjong table at the beginning of the story, and the master piece at the end of the story. What a clever arrangement, opening and closing with diamond rings. Well, at the same time, what an irony and sarcasm! Oh woman ! Just like Wang Jiazhi, when she sees the master piece diamond ring, she decides to give up everything…..

Love that leaves no room for regret is not a perfect love. Eileen Chang knows better.

I crossed path with Eileen Chang, at least her fine literature works, back in 1997, when one of her novels (the best one in my opinion) was made into motion picture Eighteen Springs. The original novel is titled Half a Lifetime (半生緣). The film received a quiet, if not minimal reception here in San Francisco, even though it was one of the lush, engaging romance melodrama starring a stellar cast with Wu Xianlin (Eat Drink Man Woman) as Ku Manjing and Leon Lai as Shen Shijun.

It was 1930s in Shanghai. Manjing and Shijun are co-workers who are smitten from day one, a love-at-first-sight relationship that would have flourished has it not been their class distinctions and the hand of fate. Shijun’s wealthy family looks down on her. Heartbreak is inevitable. Worse yet, her older sister, Manlu (Anita Mui), works as a ballroom hostess, a kind of glorified prostitute, and Shijun’s father turns out to have been among her prosperous clients.In fact, the original Chinese text (which takes me a long time to finish) reels with this poignancy and desperation, as the heroine is swept by a checkered fate.

As befits a melodrama, there are several missed opportunities for reconciliation. Shijun’s mother tears up a letter Manjing has written to him. Shijun goes to Manlu’s house looking for Manjing, but the sister, who has her own reasons (a chicanery rather) for wanting to keep them apart, tells him she isn’t there. Spanning fifteen years that seem like a lifetime, both the film and the novel have a dramatic sweep except, it’s only through the words one can sense the grandeur of Eileen Chang’s prose, which has been honed and seasoned with ups and downs of a life’s irrationality during a chaotic political time.

『此情可待成追憶，只是當時已惘然。』命運捉弄，環境的隔離與誤解，盟誓旦旦的愛侶，一別竟成陌路。

The original text of the story, 30 pages in Chinese, reportedly took Eileen Chang two decades to complete. What amazes me is that Ang Lee, with observant eye for the historical details and calculated scenes of incredible cinematography, stretches this story into a 3-hour motion picture. It’s a film with beauty and danger.

Radiant, humble young Wang (sublime ingenue Tang Wei) has fled her village for Hong Kong during the Second World War. She joins a patriotic theater troupe at her university, and they quickly become a tightly knit group of friends and comrades. Wang’s wrenching performances rally supporters to the cause, but the troupe soon tires of confining their activism to the stage. They plan a perilously bold act of resistance that will change their lives forever–assassination of a traitor Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), who works for the Japanese.

The troupe casted Wang as a bourgeois merchant’s wife. Yee is a rising star in the “lapdog” collaborationist government, and the virginal Wang will become his mistress so that the gang can assassinate him. Now undercover as Mrs. Mak, she succeeds in catching Yee’s eye, but fate intervenes and he is posted to Shanghai.

I don’t really cared for the explicit, sexually charged scenes, which were not emphasized in the original novella. Art director has done an impeccable job recreating the scenes of Shanghai in the 1940s, with minute details down to coffee shops, vinyl player, costumes, hats, the tricycles, and the signs. Interwoven with Mandarin, Shanghai-nese, Cantonese, and Japanese, it reflects the complicated, convoluted politics of wartime. Funny that much of the social commentaries and historical background evoke from the mahjong scenes, which I find most of the people in audience have overlooked.

Let me jump on the bandwagon and join in the discussion of the latest Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000; Brokeback Mountain, 2005) movie. Lust, Caution has garnered much praise and recently won the Golden Lion at the 64th Venice International Film Festival.  Before my review, I’d like to offer some background here relating to the original short story on which the film is based, as well as its translation.

THE ORIGINAL

“Lust, Caution” is a short story written by Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), a writer born 1920 in Shanghai. Chang attended the University of Hong Kong from 1939 to 1941, majoring in Literature.  As the Japanese invasion advanced to Hong Kong, Chang had to cut short her education there and return to the then Japanese occupied Shanghai in 1942, where she began her vigorous writing career.  In a few short years she had gained popularity as a novelist, short story writer and essayist.  

Eileen Chang had been compared to Eudora Welty and Katherine Mansfield, and was considered one of the few eligible contemporary Chinese writers as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In 1952 she went back to Hong Kong and continued to publish, finally moving to the United States in 1955. A year later she married the scriptwriter Ferdinand Rehyer.  After Rehyer’s death in 1967, Chang continued to be prolific as a writer and translator of her own works, many of which had been turned into screenplays.  The more well known ones include Red Rose White Rose (1994), and Love in a Fallen City (1984), garnering numerous nominations and awards.  Apart from writing, Chang had also taught at Radcliffe College and UC Berkeley.  She lived reclusively in the latter part of her life and in 1995, died alone in her apartment in Los Angeles.  

Chang’s style is crisp and explicit, her choice of words sharp and sensual, her subject matter contemporary.  Considered progressive in her days, Chang boldly dealt with the dichotomies of eastern and western cultures, tradition and modernity, and inevitably, male and female power relations, love and betrayal.  “Lust, Caution” the short story exemplifies her style and encompasses these subject matters.  

In ‘Lust, Caution’, Chang has demonstrated that she is a master of story-telling.  Her talent lies in her succinct and incisive descriptions, the economy of words.  It is this feature that the 39-page short story is so compelling and memorable.  The story moves swiftly, effectively spilling the thrill and suspense, and bringing its reader to an intense and hard-hitting climax and ending.

Following the succinct style of Eileen Chang, here’s a synopsis of the story.  Wang Chia-chih, a university student, was recruited by a group of amateur student resistance to play a role in the assassination of Mr. Yee, the head of the secret police in the collaborative government in Japanese occupied Shanghai during the 1940’s.  Her mission was to seduce Mr. Yee and gain his trust, setting the stage for her fellow resistance members to strike.  Throughout the story, Chang intertwined the elements of love and lust, loyalty and betrayal, mass patriotism and individual desire to effectively move the story to an explosive climax.

The Special Limited Chinese Edition I have is some sort of a movie tie-in edition.  It includes the 39 page short story, printed pages of Chang’s orginal handwritten manuscript, an article written by herself in defence of her story against a critic, and another short story published posthumously.  It is published by Taiwan’s Crown Publication, just freshly out in September, 2007.  If you read Chinese, this is a valuable collector’s item.

THE TRANSLATION

This movie tie-in English edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2007) is aptly translated by Julia Lovell, professor of Chinese history and literature at the University of Cambridge.  True to the style of Chang, Lovell’s translation is succinct and incisive, moving the story swiftly and thus enhancing the suspense and intrigue.

I find her Forward particularly helpful in that she included her own insight on the characterization, furnishing her readers with the essential background to Chang’s own life, which paralleled the protagonist Wang Chia-chi.  Her discussion on Chang’s writing style and the political realities during the Japanese occupation of China in WWII is particularly useful for one to appreciate the story.

Lovell’s commentary is lucid: “…[the climax and ending] give the story its arresting originality, transforming a polished espionage narrative into a disturbing meditation on psychological fragility, self-deception, and amoral sexual possession.”

This little book includes as well an Afterword by director Ang Lee, and a provocative essay by screenwriter/producer James Shamus, who also teaches at Columbia University.  A good read on its own.  If you read English, this is a keeper.

THE MOVIE

I must admit, I had read the story in its original Chinese version twice and the English translation once before I went to see the movie.  Whether this could have affected my opinion can well be a possibility.  I went into the theatre with high expectations after reading the numerous reviews and comments from LC fans.  I was also aware that a movie should be judged on its own merits as a different artistic genre from the literary work.  After all, I had written on this topic in my post Vision not Illustration.  

As a Chinese film director, Ang Lee has the advantage of visualizing Eileen Chang’s story as an insider, one who is in touch with the language, and the sociocultural and historical background.  Armed with these qualifications, Lee has successfully created an appealing atmosphere of nostalgia and exotic visualization through cinematography and symbolism.  He has laid out for his viewers a delectable visual feast. 

But maybe because of his very attempt at perfecting the mood and setting up in details the scaffold of the story, Lee (or should I say the screenwriters James Schamus and Hui-ling Wang) had taken a bit too much time in the process.  I feel the 158 minutes could be shortened to keep alive the element of suspense. Further, being an experienced and talented director as Ang Lee, I’m sure if he so chooses, he can think of different ways to portray passion and possession without explicitly telling so by mere graphic eroticism scene after scene.  Ironically, the raw erotic displays may have robbed the viewers of the very emotions the director has intended for them.  I long for the swiftness of Eileen Chang and the subtlety of Wong Kar Wai as he did with In the Mood for Love (2000, also with Tony Leung).  Especially when one considers the laconic and intense climax bursting out at the end, the earlier part of the movie seems to be disproportionately long and off-balance.

As far as the delectable feast goes, the period costumes and setting, the cinematography, as well as the performance by the highly skilled actors Tony Leung and Joan Chen are all laudable and must be given credits.  As a first time actor, Tang Wei is proficient in capturing the ambivalence of conflicting emotions and longings as Wang Chia-chih.  American born singer/actor Lee-Hom Wang is adequate as an amateur student resistance leader.  Ironically, just because of his lack of experience in acting fits well with his role, depicting the raw naivety of the young patriots of the time. 

Despite the concerted efforts of the cast and crew and the well intentions of the director, the film is bogged down by a script that ought to have been shortened by at least a half hour to bring out the element of suspense, and keep the integrity of the spy-thriller genre.  In her defence of the brevity of description in her story, Eileen Chang wrote, ”I never underestimate the critical thinking skill of my readers.”  If the screenwriters had marked her words, the film would have been much more effective and gratifying.

~~2 1/2 Ripples