by Nick Taylor
Happy Venice Film Festival, y’all!! While Nathaniel and Elisa are off in Italy enjoying some of the season’s hottest potential offerings, I figured it’d be fun to play along at home and finally watch some noteworthy Venice prizewinners I somehow hadn’t seen yet, or have been prioritizing for years but never gotten around to viewing.
And among the most urgent films for this tour was 2007’s Golden Lion winner Lust, Caution, Ang Lee’s story of espionage in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong across several years of World War II, dramatizing on-the-ground political stakes with an eye towards contemporaneous cinematic flourishes and the defining grit and elegance of ‘40s noir. The 1979 novella by Ellen Chang was infamous for supposedly extrapolating story elements from the life of Chinese spy Zheng Pingru. Lee’s film reignited those controversies while drawing some of its own, facing confusion about its country of production and earning an NC-17 rating that put it in hot water with numerous censorship laws.
Lust, Caution begins in Shanghai 1942, with a gorgeously dressed and made-up woman named Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei) playing mahjong opposite a trio of gilded, chirping housewives twice her age. She’s not a particularly aggressive or skilled player, and chooses to sit back and tend to her own hand while her three opponents gossip with her about their husband’s promotions and personal frivolities. They are interrupted by a man (Tony Leung) who we’ve earlier seen giving orders in a torture cell run by the collaborationist Chinese government. Tai Tai nervously leaves the game when he arrives, claiming a 3-o’clock appointment she had forgotten to announce when she walked in, and we wonder if she’s about to slink off with Mr. Yee. But instead, she enters a coffee shop, makes a coded call to a man her age (Wang Leehom) sitting in some unknown cabin, and he in turn tells a group of fellow revolutionaries that the time to strike has finally arrived.
We then slide back four years in the past as Wong Chia Chi, the younger, plainly dressed woman who would become Mak Tai Tai, is onboard a truck of female students on the outskirts of Shanghai. They’re off to attend Lingnan University in Hong Kong while a platoon of Chinese soldiers march past them to fight the Japanese. She and her friend become involved in a politically active drama club on campus, run by Kuang Yu Min (Leehom) and further attended by three other male students. Though she’s anxious before their first showing, Chia Chi proves herself to be an galvanizing performer of Yumin’s rhetorically inflamed propaganda piece. When her character, the peasant sister of a slain soldier who’s been tending to a serviceman injured from the same mission that killed her brother, cries that China will rise again, her audience of hundreds of downtrodden Chinese citizens is inspired to rise to their feet, shouting and sobbing with pride at her conviction.
With summer vacation approaching, Yu Min decides that his troupe needs to do something really meaningful - not just performing plays but taking action into their own hands. He proposes a plot to assassinate Mr. Yee (Leung), a special agent in China’s puppet government who specializes in rooting out Chinese resistance cells. As the best actress in the troupe, Chia Chi will take on the role of Mak Tai Tai, the glamorous wife of an importer who is often away on business. To get to Mr. Yee, she ingratiates herself with his wife (Joan Chen) and becomes a regular fixture at the woman’s mahjong games and social events. She uses these social outings as a chance to study the Yee’s protective services and vulnerabilities, returning home every evening to plot with the other students and try to kill Mr. Yee before they’re either found out and slaughtered or run out of money. All the while, Chia Ci clocks a barely sublimated hunger for her from Mr. Yee, which represents the clearest avenue to catching him alone and assassinating him if she can play him carefully.
I’ll note my one real caveat with Lust, Caution, which is its inability to dig into its supporting players deep enough for their perspectives to really emerge or develop the more we spend time with them. Yu Min, Mrs. Yee, the other four drama club students, the various members of the Chinese resistance and collaborationist government who we meet over the years - all of these actors seem ready for Lee to lean harder on them than he does, even as his other artists lavish them with the same attention Tang Wei and Tony Leung receive. The personal lives and political brinkmanship of these tertiary figures is vaguer than the twisted, compromising duet between Chia Chi and Mr. Yee they’re largely responsible for instigating.
So, one real caveat out of the way. Now then: Lust, Caution is a fantastic film, able to nimbly deepen and reinvent itself across four years of political conflict and high-risk espionage while still holding firm to a risky set of themes and aesthetic strategies. Maybe Tang and Leung have no screen partners able to match what they themselves are delivering, but they’re giving incredibly skilled performances, aided and abetted every step of the way by Lee and his artistic collaborators. I found it impossible not to think of Hitchcock’s Notorious while watching Lust, Caution, and it fully earns those comparisons as a study of one woman’s willingness to subjugate herself to a man who repulses and attracts her for the sake of her country. Rodrigo Prieto’s stylish cinematography is indebted to the nastiness and elegance of ‘40s noir while still updating it to the terms of Lee’s modern, accessible directorial style, and it negotiates these elements while maintaining an unobtrusive intimacy with Chia Chi’s perspective on her ever-shifting mission that still allows her innermost thoughts to be unbreachable to the audience.
Tim Squires and Alexandre Desplat are similarly smart at twisting and revealing themselves across the different faces that Lust, Caution wears as it progresses. Halfway into its runtime, the student's espionage game is unexpectedly thwarted, and Chia Chi is left adrift for three years until she’s called upon to reprise her role as Mak Tai Tai by Yu Min, now the revolutionary he’s always dreamed he would be. Mr. Yee has become even more enmeshed in the collaborationist government, and Chia Chi is the revolution’s only hope of anyone getting close enough to neutralize him. Here we get to the NC-17 rating, as Mr. Yee welcomes Mak Tai Tai back into the fold by initiating a violent, sadistic sexual relationship. Chia Chi hates it, and yet she begins to lose herself in Tai Tai's messy desires and the impulsive terrain that constitutes so much of her new life. Leung's performance, alternating between blistering and unexpected tenderness, does nothing to make her growing sympathies any easier to process.
All of this plays fantastically, even if it sounds unbearably lurid or clichéd to read. Everything miraculous about Lust, Caution, everything that makes it feel fresh and alive where other films have ignobly fallen, comes together in its central characterization of Wong Chia Chia. She embodies every thorny, complicated idea the film has about espionage, performance, loyalty, and deception, and is never less than a flesh-and-blood woman putting her body, mind, and soul on the line virtually every second we see her. Tang Wei gives one of the most highwire star-is-born turns I’ve ever seen, meeting the role’s intense technical demands while playing Chia Chi’s roiling, conflicted emotions incredibly close to the chest. Her subtle aging, evolution as an actress, commitment to her mission, and shifts between selves are carried off with zero fuss. She’s expertly aided by the costuming and makeup teams, who infuse her different personas with sensual, physical detail while keeping track of her finances, and ensuring she can think and move in her garments rather than rendering her a fetishized icon.
Tang’s achievement ultimately comes from how she renders Chia Chi the actress. We’ve all seen the film where an actor chooses to dramatize the relationship between a performative character and the role they’ve taken on by underlining their skill and their barely contained nerves. Tang avoids this route entirely, and instead shows us a performer with an intuitive, bodily understanding of who she’s playing. When we first see Chia Chi on stage, we don’t get the sense of a technically immaculate interpreter but of an instinctive, in-the-moment performer who is so committed to the goal she’s been given that her characters emerge fully-formed as needed. Chia Chi carries this ethos into her espionage work, leaving no distance between Wong Chia Chi and Mak Tai Tai. In the rare moments she looks distracted, we get the sense of a performer stuck in her own head. We never forget the stakes that inform her mission or the ever-evolving crisis of her relationship with Mr. Yee, yet Tang communicates all of this cleanly and dexterously. She’s as bravely consumed by her duty as Chia Chi is, and her choices are even more rewarding.