Lust, Caution

I'll confess that I'm a trifle smitten with Ang Lee. Ever since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I'm afraid. It started with a simple fascination with his visual style and morphed into adoration with Brokeback Mountain and the amazing gift he seems to have of drawing out and making visual the emotional turmoils of his principals. Lust, Caution couldn't hold a candle to either of those films, but it gave me a nifty little fix nonetheless. Gorgeous visual stylization and raw, emotional depth are abundant. (Some rather visual sex is also abundant and earned the film an NC-17.)

The story is a bit simplistic - your basic college kids get passionate about taking down the bad guys who are collaborating with the occupying other bad guys type of thing. The place is Japanese occupied Shanghai during WWII and the drama department at the local U decides to help the war effort by attempting to infiltrate the household of local head Bad Guy with an eye to off him. Of course the only one to get in is the babyfaced beauty with a crush on the leading man, and then she's asked to use her feminine wiles to ensnare him. It then gets a wee bit fuzzy about who ensnares whom, there is a lot of, um, the stuff that gets the NC17, and a highly predictable ending.

That said, I still ate it up with a spoon. The sets are lavish, the costuming supurb and that unmistakable Ang Lee camera angle/lighting genius is on full display. But even better were the beautiful performances of Tony Leung and Tang Wei as bad guy and beauty respectively. If eyes are the windows to the soul, I could have watched this film without subtitles and understood it perfectly - so nuanced are the glances, so naked and raw. Guess I'm still smitten.
Read another review here.