Lust, Caution (2007)

Although Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” is only now going into wide release in the United States, much has already been said about the prestigious director’s latest film. Predictably, most of the fleeting attention has flown to the very graphic sex scenes, despite the fact that they don’t occur for quite a while, and on the whole, don’t add up to a great deal of the film’s 157 minute running time. More astute observers have covered even that fact. What hasn’t been said so loudly and so often is that “Lust, Caution” is most effective as a meditative tale of the personal cost of life as a female spy (Tang Wei). But this is not an NC-17 rated James Bond movie. True to Ang Lee’s previous filmography of angst-ridden stories of feminine despair (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “The Ice Storm”), this entry unravels its protagonist in the most elegant of settings, in a telling so fused with dignity, you can practically see his collection of past awards just off-frame. The trouble this time is that Lee, apparently cashing in his obligatory post-“Brokeback” ticket to do whatever he wants, seems completely absorbed in his own hype. In that sense, it could be thought of as Ang Lee’s “Gangs of New York” or “The Serpent’s Egg”.