The butchery of much of China by the Japanese occupation during World War II is seen only elliptically in director Ang Lee's new psychosexual melodrama, Lust, Caution. It is best expressed in the centerpiece of the movie — the explicit, sadomasochistic sex scenes between the collaborationist Shanghai kingpin, Yee (Leung), and the alluring young beauty, Mrs. Mak (Tang), who, unbeknownst to Yee, is a spy for the liberation underground. But the violence of the occupation is also evident metaphorically, at least, in the mah-jongg game hosted by Yee's wife (Chen) that opens the movie, in which Yee and Mak exchange knowing stares but reveal little else. The scene is cut with strange and jarring jumps between extreme close-ups of hands and tiles, as if Lee were trying to express the tension inherent in situations where power and submission are the paradigm.
Unfortunately, the historical context of that scene, and that of the movie as a whole, needs to be a lot more present to be fully comprehensible to Western audiences. Though Lee evokes a noir-ish, Hollywood-studio look and pace to the movie, the mah-jongg scene, which is placed out of chronological order, will make little sense to viewers, and the shifts back in time, to when the femme fatale Mak is Wang Jiazhi, an idealistic university student who gets caught up with a dissident clique, don't help much in giving this doomed "love" affair much epic sweep.
Lee is a very talented filmmaker, though he often keeps too loose a rein on his narratives, which can meander at times, particularly in Ride With the Devil and the extended third acts of Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain. But Lust, Caution feels aimless for a different reason. The complicated chronology doesn't even function like a tease, à la Once Upon a Time in America. Though it's set in as specific a locale and ethos as most of Lee's movies (think of Fairfield County, Connecticut in the '70s in The Ice Storm), it offers very little that's genuinely provocative about either. The character of Mak/Wang — a wartime spy, a romantically frustrated seductress — is pivotal in the fate of virtually every other person in the story, yet her emotions are as obvious as her thoughts are impenetrable. (Which is not to say that Tang is incompetent; in fact, she's mesmerizing, but the script, by Wang Hui-ling and James Schamus, based on Eileen Chang's short story, gives her precious little to work with.) Yee, a calculating torturer offscreen, brutalizes his mistress because, he says, he needs to "feel" something. Ah ha! So this is a story of the pain and weakness of a nation's submission, the lack of courage and effectiveness among the rebels, the wiles and dishonesty of the lovers, and the alienation that results? Heavy.
The psychosexual expression of fascism is a theme that has been done to death in the movies, and Lee, though he tries to twist the clichés around, has nothing to add. Where Black Book, with its similar story of a beautiful woman who plays and is played by every side in Nazi-occupied Holland, was relentlessly virtuosic, Lust, Caution is relentlessly muddled. Lee, while accessing retro Hollywood, can't seem to synthesize an appropriate contemporary style for the material. It might have been better to have played it straight — small instead of epic, chronological instead of deconstructed — and to give his characters some explicitness in history instead of the bedroom.
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