Lust, Caution DVD (ENG SUB)

$ 14.50
Sales: $ 12.76

$ 14.50 + $ 3.50 (shipping fee)
Sales: $ 12.76 + $ 3.50 (shipping fee)

Mandarin

English / Chinese

DVD Box Set (NTSC - All Region)

Tony Leung, Tang Wei & Wang Lee Hom

2007 Release

A startling espionage thriller about the fate of an ordinary woman's heart, based on the short story by Eileen Chan. Tang Wei plays a Chinese student who becomes involved with a Japanese soldier during Japan's WWII occupation of Shanghai. As you may have heard, their romance is consummated in a sufficiently sexy manner to garner an NC-17 rating.

Stylized and visually arresting, with intense sex scenes that earned the film an NC-17 rating, Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" is an immersion into another time, place and mentality. This capturing of an era's mentality is what makes the film more than just another exalted period piece. Set in Japanese-occupied China during World War II, the film depicts people whose lives have been infected by a protracted war that permeates every aspect of life and complicates and perverts the simplest of interactions.

Based on the story by Eileen Chang, "Lust, Caution," which won the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Film Festival, unfolds at a languorous (or cautious) pace, ultimately leaving audiences with a haunted feeling. Though the film does not show combat, it does present, in a gradual and increasingly unsettling way, war's psychological effects. The fact of the occupation is with every character at all times. It's impossible to forget, and eventually that feeling gets inside the audience, too, that uneasy sense of there always being something to worry about, some constraint on expression or behavior.

The movie tells the story of an innocent young woman, Chia Chi (Tang Wei), who falls in with a group of politically minded actors. When performing protest plays no longer seems important enough for them, the troupe turns to Resistance work, and Chia Chi goes along for the ride. She turns out to be the most valuable member of the Resistance cell, the prettiest woman and thus the one most likely to seduce and unbalance the Chinese traitor Mr. Yee, who is systematically destroying the Resistance.

The perversion of natural impulse begins with Chia Chi's initiation. A virgin assigned to play a seductive married woman whose husband is out of town, Chia Chi submits to having mechanical sex with one of the Resistance members, just to get the hang of what she's going to be doing with the traitor. This is the beginning of war's distortions, and it becomes a running motif - people doing normal human things for twisted or wrong reasons. The whole notion that lust can go hand in hand with caution, that there can be abandon and restraint simultaneously, is disturbing to nature. War poisons everything.

As Chia Chi, Wei floats through the movie in a virtual fog of malaise, and Tony Leung, as Mr. Yee, is stern and forbidding, rarely letting the cold mask drop. No one shows all his cards, including Joan Chen, as Mr. Yee's sly, observant wife. As a consequence of all this reserve, some may find "Lust, Caution" excruciatingly dull, but pay close attention - beneath the surface, behind the mask of either coldness or sadness, there's usually more going on. And everything that's going on explodes to the surface in the sex scenes.