NipPierce Wow, this is a REALLY bad movie!

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

popcorninhell On its face, Lust, Caution should be a heavy film composed of worthwhile themes. Set in China during and in the aftermath of Japanese WWII occupation, the film certainly has a lot to work with. Add to that an espionage tinged love angle, a competent director in Ang Lee and a two and a half hour run time, surely Lust, Caution is given a wide enough birth to become the finest of Far East imports. Sadly, despite some strong performances and adornment, the film ultimately feels shallow and inert.The film begins with the enigmatic Mrs. Mai (Tang) calling resistance fighters just before an assassination attempt on Chinese collaborator Mr. Yee (Chiu-Wai). We then flash back to 1938 Hong Kong where the buxom Mai is but a humble, virginal student named Jiazhi who has passion for theater. Due to the Japanese invasion, Jiazhi connects herself with the shambling local resistance fighters and begins to spy on Mr. Yee. The plan; gather information and kill the man by impersonating the wife of a Hong-Kong based trading company. What begins as a simple mission turns more complicated when a love triangle forms between Mr. Yee, Jiazhi and Kuang (Leehom) a fellow student and adamant true believer in Chinese resilience.Despite a few widely framed soldiers, the Japanese are conspicuously absent from the film. The only presumed enemy is Mr. Yee and to a much lesser extent his absent-minded wife (Chen). Jiazhi as Mrs. Mai sits with Mrs. Yee in elongated games of Mahjongg, picking up tiny pieces of gossip while the man of the house shuttles back and forth between work and home. Mai's attempts to woe her mark builds a low humming tension giving the film much needed atmosphere. It's the type of atmosphere one would expect from many of the Hollywood films Jiazhi goes to see in the movie theater though it's closest influence would arguably be Hitchcock's Notorious (1946).Difference is, the plot eventually got going in Notorious. In Lust, Caution, the stakes of Jiazhi's gambit don't really hit home until halfway through the film. The midriff of the movie reaches a crescendo in a moment of shocking violence followed by nothing that really brings new insights or complications. It's like watching an elaborate juggling act only the performer is doing one impressive feat for thirty minutes. Sure, it's exciting at first but after a while you're thinking, "Is that it?"When the romance is finally consummated (albeit in a sexually violent way), years have passed. The resistance evolved from a group of students into an interconnected web of lies and self- preservation. Yet through it all Mrs. Mai and Mr. Yee drift and reconnect with all the urgency of a tortoise documentary on pause. Their listless dance of seduction and deceit is punctuated by drawn- out moments of un-stimulated sex whose decadence calls attention to itself and distracts from the story. No doubt, Lee's reverence to the physical form is artistically full of merit and the warm palettes of the room where the characters play out their tryst could infuse effortlessly in a better film; but here it feels mechanical. Neither does the sex (which garnered the film its NC-17 rating) compliment the films themes of foreboding and tragedy. The story becomes downright Sophoclean yet the visuals are vivacious and stuffy.Lust, Caution went on to sweep up all the major awards at the Venice Film Festival and was hailed during it's time as sensual, vibrant, beautiful looking espionage drama. Well not to put my head in the Golden Lion's mouth, but I take exception to the film being called sensual; pretty: maybe, but sensual: no. Sensuality implies carnal gratification of the senses. There's nothing really gratifying about ten minutes of sex scenes involving two disengaged characters trying to stem the looming specter of death and anguish. If anything Lust, Caution is a sad movie, or at least should have been if it wasn't fighting itself.

Jill Wisoff (FantasyCreatureFilmsLLC) Someone pointed out to me that on this date, July 7, 1937, the Japanese attacked Nanjing, murdering 300,000 civilians. This was the beginning of the Japanese war on China. I reflected on this and thought back to those hours in a movie theater on Houston Street in NYC where Ang Lee was attending a screening of his new film, Lust/Caution. I remembered the opening scene, a group of women sitting around a table playing mah jongg, and immediately knew I was watching a master work by this director. Not a note of the film was out of place, not the direction, cinematography, editing, performances. Not the devastating conclusion. Though years have passed, the film remains in my memory much the way my first viewing of La Strada or The Seventh Seal do. It is a film anyone who appreciates master work by a great filmmaker should see in their lifetime, uncut. It is a film as well that captures the essence of the atrocities of that war, the sacrifices, the brutalities. It is a heartbreakingly skewed love story and war story that will resonate long after you experience it. I do believe it should enter the recognized canon of greatest films ever made.

chaos-rampant The exercise here seems to be the layered portrait of a woman (an actress) unsure of herself. There is a lot of other stuff thrown in with Hong Kong and Shanghai in the grip of war, spying and politics, that is basically broadening the canvas with enough life to make the main image more lush and lifelike as opposed to a dry examination, bring clarity to it as something we unearth from a busy world. It is what Wong Kar Wai does in his films when stretching time, though not exactly the same.That image is actually an image of her, shown twice.That is where she's talking on the phone in the cafe, more sensually memorable when moments later she puts on perfume. The first time it happens we know close to nothing of her, except an implied affair with Mr. Lee, stolen from glances like in a Wong Kar Wai film. The second time near the end we know everything, again she talks on the phone and puts on perfume but now everything's changed, we know who both are and what is to be done.In between this mirrored image is the bulk of the film, all that fleshing out of the world and her as memory that shifts our position in the story by shifting what we know of the situation. It drags for me but there's a payoff in the end.Here's very clearly how it works in the film, it's clever stuff. If you have seen just the first part leading up to the phonecall, and the last part resuming from the phonecall until the end, in that part of the story after she has fallen in love, her actions make sense.In that part, Mr. Lee is just a sweet, taciturn man, not unlike the husband Tony Leung played in Mood for Love. Why'd she do it?But you have seen everything else, known him with more depth as an unpleasant man and can't unknow him, unless that is if you excuse the film as erotic. So you question her judgment of allowing herself to be seduced, as do her puzzled comrades in the firing squad line.She an actress, he a watcher.Her initially acting in the theater, later having to act in life, in the mahjong games with rich bored housewives, as the mistress. He watches, cautious at first but steadily drawn in. She is drawn by him watching, later forcing his way into her performance.It's not far from Wong Kar Wai's later films, which go back to Bertollucci's Last Tango to Vertigo (better yet, Nabokov's Lolita), where a man and woman, he is usually older and experienced, create between them a space of obsessive passion, where names and identity dissolve.Lee has done it halfway between Kar Wai and Bertolluci, shifting from coy glances to lots and lots of sex—but if you are fooled by it, you are fooled as she is, seduced because it's erotic.The point in all cases? That space ruled by nameless desire which may seem more pure and sometimes we covet in life, where we won't have to be who we are, is in fact more illusory, desire bents the shape of things into what is desired of them to be. As in a film noir, where desire (coded in the femme fatale) fools with the narrator's reality.On all this topics as well as main story, Lee inserts Hitchcock's film noir Suspicion which our heroine sees in the theater—a film where a young girl wonders whether her charming man may not be a murderer, and a studio tacked-on (meaning false) ending puts her mind at ease.Linked in all cases with memory as the untrustworthy desire to bend the life we choose to recall, it is a purely cinematic subject, where again there's the escape into something more pure than just life, but it's an illusory ecstacy, light poured on canvas. Enchanting for a while, but the lights have to come back on again.So why'd she do it? Because all that she knows about him is abstract when he touches her, the touch is real.So Lee has compromised, in this as in others of his films, it is half a great film in a rather ordinary package. You can kid yourself with the story, whereas not in 2046. But if it leads even one person into likeminded filmmakers who work outside producer constraints, it was all worth it.

kneiss1 Most of the movies I have seen recently have been more entertaining than moving. Not this one. This movie simply was incredible about its expressiveness. By seeing into the faces of the actors, you have been living through a myriad of feelings. It's rare a movie is achieving this for me. The reasons are several: Great story, great directing, great music, great atmosphere, great acting. Everything came together and created a movie on a rare level of perfection.****Spoileralert****Throughout the whole movie was an ulterior tension. You have always been scared that either the main actress gets caught, or the main actor is killed. It kept me interested through all 157 minutes.So why does this movie only have 7.6 points on IMDb? It deserves much more. There might be several reasons. Hong Kong movies are rated less high than Hollywood movies in general. And this movie here, doesn't have much in common with Hollywood movies at all. Especially the ending is something that can rarely be found in Hollywood movies. Also, the almost 3 hours might have been too much for many people. Another reason are probably the raw and controversial sexual scenes. I have to say though, they fit perfectly into this movie. They reflect the emotional world the two main actors live in perfectly. I really hate to see women "raped" in movies (she wasn't exactly raped), but it really seemed to "belong" to this movie.****Spoileralert ending****This movie deserves over 8 points on IMDb. I give this movie 10 points because it's is perfect in my eyes. It's probably going to be one one of my all time favorites.