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Call me crazy, but I didn’t find the sex scenes in Lust, Caution all that graphic. I take it as a case of the MPAA blushing at the first sighting of pubic hair, clutching their pearls, and clucking their tongues. What struck me about these scenes wasn’t what one could or couldn’t see, but the emotional context and complicated feelings going on underneath. Lust, Caution knows, like Last Tango in Paris, that a sex scene is only truly successful if it somehow connects to an emotion in the story.
Lust, Caution tells the story of a young college student who joins in with a group of political radicals who band together to plan an assassination, and how the closer she gets to the target, the more complicated her emotional stakes become. The film spends far more time with scheming and subtle maneuvering than it does with pelvic gymnastics, and it’s all the better for it.
The film is alive with detailed and ornate costumes, production design, and warmly textured cinematography. Director Ang Lee manages to make a game of mahjong feel loaded with political subtext, as if the slightest twist of the tiles could doom a character. All of this populates the world with believability, and then there’s the tragic doomed heroine at the center, Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei).
Her story is a two-pronged one of tragedy and doomed love affairs. She begins to work with the revolutionaries for the love of one man, who happily uses her as a prostitute to gather intelligence with the enemy, and she spends so much time with the enemy that she begins to view him with something close to love and fondness. Lust, Caution explores the consequences of sleeping with the enemy, both literally and figuratively.
As the central figure, Tang Wei is absolute dynamite. Her character’s transition from naïve innocent to convoluted seductress to doomed lover is a seamless transition. The scenes of emotional confusion in which she must act without words the complicated feelings of revulsion and pleasure for the sexual acts is a master class in subtlety. Wei makes Mak Tai Tai’s final acts feel like the logical conclusion of a woman thrust into her position. I apologize for the pun, but the film’s intense sex scenes only become clearer as the central relationship spirals out to its inevitable end. Here is a doomed romantic film put together with the artistry afforded a more blissful and romantic one.
