LUST, CAUTION
LUST, CAUTION (Se, jie)
March 15 2009, DVD, home living room, from library
Once again, director Ang Lee serves up a film so layered with emotional violence and moments of unbearable tenderness that, while I loved it so much and can't stop recommending it, it'll be a while before I can bear to watch it again. I haven't rewatched THE ICE STORM since the first time I saw it; I've been promising myself that I'd watch it again soon, but I just can't do it, knowing what I know. (Really of his, the only ones that I can rewatch a bajillion times are CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, which wonderfully mirrors and bookends this story. It'd make a great double-feature of hot, sexy, tearjerking angst.) LUST, CAUTION is at least that painful and gorgeous, but rather than one shocking moment that levels everything like a nuclear blast, it's got agony and longing and beauty all the way through.
And my God, is it sexy. It's NC-17 for a good reason - not so much the explicitness of the sex scenes, but it takes an adult sensibility and experience for those scenes to make sense. Judging by the shocking levels of not-getting-it evidenced in the IMDb's comments section, it still manages to escape a lot of viewers (who may or may not be adults). Its pointless to watch this movie with a black-and-white, wrong-and-right moral viewpoint; in times of crisis, people do things that they shouldn't, and that no sane, protected person would ever do... but that's exactly the point. The desperation the characters experience is clearly shown to us, the growing insanity of the world they inhabit and the realities that they must create for themselves to continue surviving in it make the worst kind of sense. Maybe people just can't, or don't want to ask themselves what they would do in those situations.
Perfectly cast in its two lead roles, long-beloved sex bomb Tony Leung Chiu Wai (with whom I fell in love in the roaringly sentimental HARD BOILED, and it just got worse with BULLET IN THE HEAD, HAPPY TOGETHER, and CHUNGKING EXPRESS) and brand-new actress Wei Tang (if she's got a clan, I wanna join) have an insanely hot sexual chemistry that is very rarely seen. Leung's role was specifically meant to evoke Humphrey Bogart, and he absolutely nails that combination of brutality, resignation, and a tender idealistic nature that is crushed again and again, first through outside forces, and then from self-destruction. And yet he makes it very much his own, and very Chinese, in the way I think of it and love it; the romanticism of John Woo and Wong Kar Wai, and indeed very much a certain Mr. Ang Lee. And this Wei? She's fucking hot as hell, a tightly-wrapped package of explosive just waiting to be set off. As great as Leung is, this is very much her movie.
The story is wonderful - espionage, revolutionaries, masks and deceptions, and at the center of it, a mutual attraction that oozes poison, one that it's obvious is going to destroy a lot of lives. And yet they just can't help it. Or it doesn't matter if they do or not; the world is ending. They grasp at life, even as it slashes them to ribbons.
Yeah, just see it. My highest recommendation for the year so far, easily one of the best films I've ever seen, and it makes my knickers tingle. Gorgeous sets; gorgeous costumes; gorgeous cinematography. Gorgeous everything. (It's also got Joan Chen.) See it.
March 15 2009, DVD, home living room, from library
Once again, director Ang Lee serves up a film so layered with emotional violence and moments of unbearable tenderness that, while I loved it so much and can't stop recommending it, it'll be a while before I can bear to watch it again. I haven't rewatched THE ICE STORM since the first time I saw it; I've been promising myself that I'd watch it again soon, but I just can't do it, knowing what I know. (Really of his, the only ones that I can rewatch a bajillion times are CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, which wonderfully mirrors and bookends this story. It'd make a great double-feature of hot, sexy, tearjerking angst.) LUST, CAUTION is at least that painful and gorgeous, but rather than one shocking moment that levels everything like a nuclear blast, it's got agony and longing and beauty all the way through.
And my God, is it sexy. It's NC-17 for a good reason - not so much the explicitness of the sex scenes, but it takes an adult sensibility and experience for those scenes to make sense. Judging by the shocking levels of not-getting-it evidenced in the IMDb's comments section, it still manages to escape a lot of viewers (who may or may not be adults). Its pointless to watch this movie with a black-and-white, wrong-and-right moral viewpoint; in times of crisis, people do things that they shouldn't, and that no sane, protected person would ever do... but that's exactly the point. The desperation the characters experience is clearly shown to us, the growing insanity of the world they inhabit and the realities that they must create for themselves to continue surviving in it make the worst kind of sense. Maybe people just can't, or don't want to ask themselves what they would do in those situations.
Perfectly cast in its two lead roles, long-beloved sex bomb Tony Leung Chiu Wai (with whom I fell in love in the roaringly sentimental HARD BOILED, and it just got worse with BULLET IN THE HEAD, HAPPY TOGETHER, and CHUNGKING EXPRESS) and brand-new actress Wei Tang (if she's got a clan, I wanna join) have an insanely hot sexual chemistry that is very rarely seen. Leung's role was specifically meant to evoke Humphrey Bogart, and he absolutely nails that combination of brutality, resignation, and a tender idealistic nature that is crushed again and again, first through outside forces, and then from self-destruction. And yet he makes it very much his own, and very Chinese, in the way I think of it and love it; the romanticism of John Woo and Wong Kar Wai, and indeed very much a certain Mr. Ang Lee. And this Wei? She's fucking hot as hell, a tightly-wrapped package of explosive just waiting to be set off. As great as Leung is, this is very much her movie.
The story is wonderful - espionage, revolutionaries, masks and deceptions, and at the center of it, a mutual attraction that oozes poison, one that it's obvious is going to destroy a lot of lives. And yet they just can't help it. Or it doesn't matter if they do or not; the world is ending. They grasp at life, even as it slashes them to ribbons.
Yeah, just see it. My highest recommendation for the year so far, easily one of the best films I've ever seen, and it makes my knickers tingle. Gorgeous sets; gorgeous costumes; gorgeous cinematography. Gorgeous everything. (It's also got Joan Chen.) See it.