It’s 1942 in Japanese occupied Shanghai and Mrs. Mak (Wei Tang) leaves her rich, sophisticated friends at the mahjong table to engage in a lengthy flashback sequence. Four years earlier, as an innocent girl in a politicised theatre troupe, our heroine accepted an assignment to kill Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a powerful Japanese collaborator.
Almost 100 minutes of film flicker by before they finally get it on in a gruesome, sadistic fashion. Then they do it again. And again. And again.
Oh dear. It’s a terrible thing when a great director follows one of their best films with one of their worst. To an ignoble roll call that includes Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and Robert Altman’s Prêt A Porté, we may now add Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. A tepid, ponderous espionage drama underscored by the most distasteful sexual politics since the squiring of Susan George in Straw Dogs; it couldn’t be further from Brokeback Mountain if it tried. Where its predecessor was jollied along by instantly iconic moments – the roughhousing in the tent, Heath Ledger pounding the wall – Mr. Lee’s unnecessarily lengthy follow-up is merely elegantly unmemorable.
Here, the graphic sex scenes do little or nothing to further the grammar of cinematic erotica. In fact, visually, this is indistinguishable from godawful soft-core supermarket porn. It’s the context that makes it disquieting to watch. He straps her violently with a belt. She yelps and howls convincingly only to return to her commanding officer to describe how she is repeatedly violated until she bleeds.