Review: Lust, Caution

RECOMMENDED
This is bold: to make a film of its own style and pace, but within a budget that allows it, instead of running its financiers, to use the goodwill earned from a movie like “Brokeback Mountain.” Ang Lee’s NC-17 “Lust, Caution,” drawn from a short story by Eileen Chang, adapted by “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” co-writers Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus (who co-produces and is also the head of distributor Focus Features), is a Chinese-language art movie and proud of it. Some early reviewers have dismissed the movie as the equivalent of Michael Cimino following “The Deer Hunter” with “Heaven’s Gate,” but they’re just silly. The movie is an espionage thriller set in World War II Shanghai, for the most part, and makes literal invocations of Hitchcock, among other filmmakers. But the noir elements have a blush, in the sexual grappling between a young Hong Kong acting student, Wang Chia-chih (Tang Wei) who is sent to befriend, to bed and to kill a political figure in charge of torture, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). The sex scenes were shot on padded sets as in the filming of hand-to-hand combat, if that’s any indication of how the issues of power get depicted. Wei has slightly wonky eyes in a round face, and her expressions are more evocative than the clean, simple lines of the narrative. (They tend to travel a bit when her character dissembles, followed by a purse of her small mouth.) Still, there is an explosive moment that follows the key, definitive decision of one of the characters, that all the talk and fuss (and mah-jongg games) add up to: I will simply say it is like the launch of a rocket and is the most masterful instant of a well-observed, luxuriously mounted, committedly languorous movie. There are details galore, including a usage of the backs of characters the way Carl Dreyer did (a favorite of Schamus); Wei weeping at a close-up of Ingrid Bergman in a battered 16mm projection of “Casablanca”; the interiors of cafes and bars that emulate lost Kowloon; and the last shot holds its breath, and shadow, for the proper, illuminating moment. 157m. (Ray Pride)