Word: lust
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First, let's talk about the sex. There's a lot of it in Ang Lee's new film, Lust, Caution: sweaty, acrobatic coupling that is, by turns, brutish and tender. And the camera doesn't shy away from any panting detail. Explicit even by today's standards, the movie works hard to earn the adults-only NC-17 rating it has been given in the U.S. Shooting the scenes was so exhausting that Lee and his cast could only work half-days. On one occasion, lead actress Tang Wei fainted...
...With Lust, Caution Lee is charting new territory, trading Brokeback's Ansel Adams vistas for oppressive World War II Shanghai. But Lust, Caution shares with that film a mournful, elegiac tone. "It's this idea of repressed or impossible love," Lee says. "I find that yearning attractive. Somehow, it's my observation of the grand illusion of love: you can never acquire it, or attain it, or describe it. So the more difficult or elusive it is - or in this case, the more twisted - that becomes very attractive to me in making a movie...
...Lust, Caution turns on a particularly dangerous liaison. Based on a novella by Chinese writer Eileen Chang, it's the story of a college student, played by Chinese TV actress Tang, who is recruited by a patriotic theater troupe planning to assassinate a cold-blooded interrogator for the occupying Japanese (played by Hong Kong star Tony Leung). To insinuate herself into his bourgeois world, and to ultimately seduce him, she transforms herself from a gawky ingenue into a ruby-lipped Mata Hari. She's initially playing a role. But her performance shades into real feeling, and their affair begins...
...strain between traditional Chinese families and their modern children, Lee began working with a larger palette, jumping from genre to genre without a misstep. What other filmmaker has adapted both Jane Austen and a comic book, or followed a kung-fu film with a movie about gay cowboys? In Lust, Caution, Lee is trying out yet another, marrying an old-fashioned noir spy thriller à la Hitchcock's Notorious with a serious-minded inquiry into the nature of desire...
...made a habit of teaching Hollywood how little it knows about audiences, proving broad crowds would embrace a gay Western (Brokeback Mountain) and show up for a subtitled martial arts flick (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). With his new film, the NC-17-rated, Mandarin-language spy thriller Lust, Caution, the Oscar-winning director is once again ignoring the rules of commercial filmmaking...