Lust, Caution

Ang Lee's new film - his second filmed in China, after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and his first since the acclaimed Brokeback Mountain - begins with such an intensely observed game of mahjong you half expect the Hulk to appear from underneath the table and scatter these society ladies who have so little to talk about but their husbands, business, and black market goods.

We are in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, 1942. The hostess, Mrs Yee (Joan Chen), is sitting pretty. Her husband (Tony Leung) is a powerful politician who works hand in fist with the occupation. She has no clue that their houseguest, Mrs Mak (Wei Tang) is not who she claims to be. Still less that she will soon be embroiled in a frenzied affair with her husband.

Flashback to 1938: Chia Chi Wong is a first year university student who falls in with a drama society led by the fervently patriotic Yu Min Kuang (Lee-Hom Wang). But propaganda is not enough for Kuang. He enlists a core group to help him assassinate a leading collaborator. Their leading lady, Wong becomes the bait to hook this fish and get him away from his bodyguards.

Based on a short story by Eileen Chang (whose fiction has inspired several important Chinese films, including The Flowers Of Shanghai, Eighteen Springs and Red Rose, White Rose), Lust, Caution draws on contributions from fashionable talents such as the French composer Alexandre Desplat (Birth) and the Mexican director of photography Rodrigo Prieto (Babel).

It makes for a classy package, and the film came away from the Venice Film Festival last September with the top prize, the Golden Lion.

The movie has also raised eyebrows (and headlines) with its explicit sex. (It comes with an 18 Certificate.) But Lee certainly makes you wait for it. It's about two hours before Wong/Mak finally seduces Mr Yee� At times it feels more like the three years that have elapsed on screen.

The coupling is aggressive and artfully splayed, but Yee remains grimly tightlipped in even the most compromising positions, and it's hard to care when Lee so persistently angles for tragedy when the material cries out "melodrama" with every sinew.

There is a kernel of an interesting movie here, something akin to Hitchcock's Notorious, in which Ingrid Bergman fell in love with spymaster Cary Grant but seduced Claude Rains at his behest. (Look carefully, you'll spot posters for films by Hitch, Grant and Bergman which point in this direction.)

The new film adds a cruel twist to that set up with its perverse sexuality, but unlike, say, Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, with which it shares certain plot points, Lee rarely allows us to enjoy the ride; he clamps everything down in a surfeit of sour sobriety. Clearly this repression ("caution") is intentional, and meant to amplify the passion that follows, but instead it winds up suffocating the drama completely.

Lust, Caution has a couple of strong set pieces and good performances, but it would have had more impact with 45 minutes cut out of its two and a half hour running time.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com