Espionage sex
Intrigue lurks as Ang Lee puts actress-spy in bed with wartime target
Say what you will about the sex scenes in the NC-17 "Lust, Caution" - they're anything but gratuitous.
Ang Lee's World War II espionage movie is about a Chinese resistance fighter (Tang Wei) who, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, seduces a high-ranking collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) in order to set him up for assassination.
Just about everything that's important about their psychologically tortured relationship plays out while sexual congress is in session - sessions that involve bondage, submission and what appears to border on rape.
The nature of the story makes it impossible to say for certain what transpires during these wrestling matches. The resistance has recruited the young woman because she is a skilled actress, and so the viewer is never sure whether her convincing responses - which run the gamut from protest to pleasure - are in earnest.
Complicating matters is the fact that young actress is not a freedom fighter of the fiercest kind. She joins the cause mainly to impress a would-be boyfriend and feels degraded when he essentially pimps her out to the targeted quisling.
By contrast, Chiu-Wai's character is a self-preservation specialist who realizes he has placed a losing bet with the Japanese, and finds himself half-heartedly going through the motions of a game he's fated to lose.
Neither is very noble, or driven by principle, and they begin to look upon their time in the bedroom as a kind of sanctuary, leading to something that may be love, or just some further form of deception.
This aspect of "Lust, Caution" works fairly well, and there are certainly worse things than watching Tang Wei do her NC-17 imitation of a resistance fighter imitating a love of sex.
But the expansive "Lust, Caution" is 158 minutes, about 8 of which are between the sheets. The remainder is a kind of dreary, suspenseless spy thriller - many scenes of the high-heeled Wei meeting a fellow conspirator in a movie theater (highlighting the movie's themes of pretense), or a dingy room somewhere.
The stakes are conceptually very high, but there's something punchless and inconsequential about these clandestine meetings, and the secondary characters feel weirdly underdeveloped, despite the movie's extravagant running time. *
Produced by Ang Lee, James Schamus, Bill Kong, directed by Ang Lee, written by James Schamus, Wang Hui-ling, music by Alexandre Desplat, distributed by Focus Films.