LUST, CAUTION Controversy at Venice Film Festival 2007
August 30th, 2007 by Andre Soares
Based on a semi-autobiographical short story by Eileen Chang, the two-and-half-hour Se, jie / Lust, Caution, Ang Lee’s first Chinese-language film since the 2000 martial-arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, stars Tony Leung as a powerful politician who is seduced by a young woman (newcomer Tang Wei) involved with a group of revolutionary students. The politician is a collaborator, assisting the Japanese occupiers in 1940s Shanghai.
Needless to say, the film’s politics and psychology have been all but ignored in favor of discussions about the (apparently quite explicit) sex scenes. Are they real? Is it all cgi? Do people actually do such things in real life?
The ratings board members at the Motion Picture Association of America apparently don’t, as they gave Lust, Caution a NC-17 rating. There goes the teenage market for the film. (Theoretically, that is.) If only Ang Lee had shown the two leads vomiting on one another, or perhaps chopping off each other’s heads; his film would then have received the more lenient R rating.
At least for the time being, the Taiwanese government isn’t too preoccupied with the kinky sex in Lust, Caution. Taiwan has complained that Lee’s film has been referred to in some quarters as a production from "Taiwan, China," reportedly as a result of pressure from Beijing.
Lust, Caution is one of the features in competition for this year’s Golden Lion. Lee won the award in 2005 for another controversial drama dealing with human sexuality, Brokeback Mountain.
Personally, I just hope that Lust, Caution won’t be one more moralizing tale about the dangers of a very natural human instinct.
Addendum: Variety’s review has Lust, Caution as a "Hong Kong-U.S.-China" production. In the magazine, Derek Elley complains that "too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of" the film.
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