You’ve got to love Ang Lee don’t you? He consistently makes some fabulous films. The first of his that I saw was The Wedding Banquet, but before you knew it, he’d turned his hand to Jane Austen and made Sense and Sensibility (now re-appearing in a new “sexed up” Andrew Davies TV production). Then there was the wonderful Ice Storm set in a remarkably real feeling seventies. Ride With The Devil followed – another period drama but this time against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Then he went back to the Far East to make a phenomenally successful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Next he turned to The Hulk – the only Lee film I’ve yet to see, before returning to form with Brokeback Mountain.
Now we have Lust, Caution which is drawing lots of attention because of its sex scenes.
Wei Tang plays Wong Chia Chi who is part of a student group who decide that they must kill Tony Leung’s character – a Chinese sympathiser with the Japanese during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan.
The murder attempt goes wrong and we jump forward a few years where the resistance takes Wei Tang’s character into its heart to have another go at killing the politician.
The film jumps around a little as it tells its wonderful little tale at a stately pace. It was quite surprising to walk out of the cinema and discover that I’d been in there for well over two and a half hours.
As ever with Lee, you really feel that he’s got the period detail spot on. The students are naive yet believable in their hatred of the Japanese oppressors. While Shanghai is beautifully rendered during the second world war, with English speaking establishments that somehow wouldn’t have been out of place in England during the war.
The relationship between the two key characters is what’s at the heart of this film, and it’s crushingly believable. This is an exceptional piece and well worth seeing. I can’t wait to see what Lee turns his hand to next!
Oh, and I don’t understand the rules of mahjong, so the opening scene took me a while to get into.