"Movies are for people with time to kill," says the main character of Ang Lee’s new film Se jie (Lust, Caution), and in this particular case this means killing two-and-a-half hours, though there are certainly worse ways to pass the time. The Taiwanese director’s adaptation of a novella by Eileen Chang is an uncompromising and incredibly seductive piece of filmmaking that is too long but has so many good elements going for it that it is hard to really care that on certain points the director seems to have thrown caution to the wind. Acting and technical credits are more than first-class and newcomer Wei Tang, starring alongside veteran Tony Leung, is simply riveting. Appropriately marketing this film -- almost certainly the most explicit Chinese-language film this side of porn ever made -- will be a challenge, though, ideally, Lee’s reputation should do the heavy lifting in that department.A prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it plays in Competition, could be a first push to wider recognition.

 

Set during the Japanese occupation of China in the early 1940s, Se jie plays out between Hong Kong and Shanghai and centres on the character of Wang Jiazhi (Wei Tang), a young student who gets caught up in a resistance cell formed by the patriotic theatre group she was part of. Her big mission: infiltrate the household of Mr Yee (Tony Leung), a high-placed official who openly collaborates with the Japanese occupiers. The goal: put everything into place to have the traitor killed in cold blood. The means: using her womanly wiles.

 

One can imagine this scenario going various ways (Verhoeven would have made an interesting film out of this and his Zwartboek  / Black Book shares more than a few elements with this film), but Lee has chosen to approach it in the only way he knows: searching for the humans behind the dangle of story threads and plot twists. Se jie is a thriller and has many chilling moments, but the real danger comes about only because we care for the characters. No jumps from the dark or sudden explosions here.

 

The sure-to-be-talked-about explicit sex scenes only make an appearance well after the mid-point of the film, when Lee has had more than enough time to invest the two characters with so much emotional baggage that it is impossible to only consider the bodily acts that occur between them. It is one of the few instances in the history of cinema that pinpoints the complicated wrangle between love -- or hate -- and lust that occurs during lovemaking with such precision. Of course for a spy in bed with the enemy, there can never be no such thing as complete and utter nakedness, whatever the state of undress. The film nicely plays with these contrasts of love and lust, caution and abandon, weaving a web of complex emotions that typifies so many of Lee's films.

 

Lee also makes a point of playing up other erotically charged moments that happen when the characters are fully dressed, from their very first glance at one another at a mahjong table to an absolutely chilling moment in which they barely touch hands in a Japanese brothel. This charge is only really present when the two lovers have fallen in lust, and up until that point the film meanders.

 

The early section is too leisurely set up to make any direct impact, though it does sketch all the main characters extremely well, including Mrs Yee (Joan Chen) and Kuang Yu-Min (Lee-hom Wang), the theatre director who persuades Tang’s character to go undercover and who seems to be interested in her himself as well. Shifts back and forth in time seem arbitrary at first but make sense in retrospect, while Lee, more so than in his previous films, pays explicit homage to many films from the past, especially those from the period in which Se jie is set and which served as an obvious first template for this film.

 

The major discovery of the film is Wei Tang, who is completely believable as the shy young girl-come-professional seductress, and Leung once again shows why he is considered one of the world’s best actors. Technical aspects of the film are all extremely polished, including costume and production design (sometimes a little heavy on the CGI in the cityscapes), Rodrigo Prieto's stunningly lit cinematography that plays with light and shadows throughout the film and Alexandre Desplat’s lush period score that is perfectly suited to the old-fashioned yet contemporary tone of the film.

 

 

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