Lust, Caution (spoilers!)
08.11.07 - 4:22 p.m.
Last night I went with David and Jeremy Mong to watch Lust, Caution - the uncut, R-21 version. Our first R-21 movie... man, I guess we all lost a bit of innocence together! Today I read in the papers that what we watched was actually the sneak preview. We'd bought tickets in great urgency cos we thought the run was ending (having been stuck in busy postings and not following the movies for a long time, and having already let much-hyped movies like Transformers and Ratatouille come and go without being able to watch any of them, we decided to just whack and watch this movie while we could before the run too ended. Little did we know that the NC-16 cut version had ended, but the R-21 run was just beginning.)



I guess I won't bother detailing the story (for some good reviews, read the following:

Review from the definitive lovehkfilm.com

and if you want to read more,

review from SFgate.com
review from New York Times
review from The Star online

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Halfway through the show, I realised that one shouldn't see R-21 movies with friends of the opposite gender haha. It's embarrassing. In fact, I think I would have been frightfully embarrassed if I had been watching this show with any other guy friends than these two longtime buddies with their post-show perennial 'tease Joanna' double act.

(SPOILERS)

Jeremy: There are two morals of the story. #1: "All men think with their balls." #2: "All women can be bought with diamonds."

Joanna: NOOOO... she was not bought by the diamond! Hmm, my two morals of the story would be: #1: "Every harmless-looking or 'good' guy has a hidden evil and lustful side" and #2: "Sex looks painful"!

Jeremy and David: Erm....!!!!

Jeremy: I'll stick with "All women can be bought with diamonds."

David: Yeah, that's my moral of the story too.

Joanna: Nooo!! It wasn't the diamond! It was because she thought it meant that he cared about her it wasn't the diamond per se!

David: No, Joanna, it was the diamond... Did you see the way her eyes misted up WHEN SHE SAW THE DIAMOND...

Joanna: NOOOOO... She wasn't crying because of the DIAMOND itself! It wasn't the diamond!

David: Yeah right Joanna, it was definitely the diamond! Give you a diamond and you'll talk differently!

Jeremy: Now we know that diamonds are the way to every woman's heart...Diamonds are a girl's best friend!

Joanna: NOOO!! That is not the moral of the story!! Oh, you two are incorrigible.

Jeremy: Don't you know, you signed away your right to intelligent conversation when you decided to watch a movie with me and David...

* * *

So what was the show like?

Knowing that I'm a big fan of Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Hwee Chyen had actually warned me not to watch the show. ("It'll destroy your image of Tony Leung forever. Don't watch it!") She'd also had many other things to say (including its explicitness - "I don't think Carina Lau would be too happy about this show" and "Did they really need Tony Leung to act this role? They could have gotten ANY other man to do it..")...

Hmm. Well, for starters, it was the first time I'd watched Tony Leung play a villain. His character in Lust, Caution is Mr Yee, a cold-blooded collaborator with the Japanese who brutally interrogates resistance members and brings some of the same brutality into the bedroom, like Ralph Fiennes in some of his more reptilian screen incarnations. As the review at LoveHKfilm.com puts it, "gone is the somewhat impish, self-conscious charm that usually reveals him to be a lovable rogue". He's a nasty, cold, calculating baddy.

As the main protagonist, newcomer actress Tang Wei is very very good. Her performance reminded me of Eva Green's in Casino Royale - very cool, poised, and elegant. And yet when she's not 'in character' as the Mak Tai Tai who ensnares Mr. Yee, her character's 'real self' appears to be a simple, ordinary student, whom one would not imagine could conjure up the presence of mind and womanly wiles to play such a sophisticated, loaded part in an espionage drama. This adds to the complexity of her character.

Despite the nuanced performances of the two leads, the story is a very simple one, and you can predict the ending 20 minutes into the show. In a movie with this kind of plot - "young girl working for the Resistance becomes lover of high-ranking bad guy collaborating with the Japanese in order to help the Resistance to assassinate him" there can only be 3 outcomes: a) she doesn't fall in love with him, but only pretends to; b) she falls in love with him, and still betrays him anyway; c) she falls in love with him, and betrays her friends. No prizes for guessing which the answer is in the end, and it doesn't really matter to the show's characters what the outcome turns out to be I guess, because the tragedy is not in the ending - the biggest sacrifices made by the characters are along the course of the show, not at its end.

What makes this show a good show is not the espionage story itself, but the story of Tang Wei's character. We meet her as a relatively simple, innocent girl in 1938 who has the gift of good acting and stars in some patriotic, melodramatic plays to raise money for the war against Japan. However, when Wang Leehom the student leader decides that they should turn assassin and the group of students first decides on their plot to kill Mr Yee (before they join up with the real Resistance), she ends up falling into the role of the seductress... one gets the impression that it's just because she has the best acting skills.

Then the students realise that if they're serious about getting Mr Yee this way, she's eventually going to have to sleep with him... But she's a virgin and won't know what to do... So it is tacitly decided that one of her friends and fellow students, who's the only one with any experience, has to sleep with her to teach her the basics!! (!! this has the "ewww!" factor!) And it's not even the one she likes, who is Wang Leehom, whose bright idea it was in the first place to get them all into that sticky situation at all, and so for the good of their collective idealism and belief in the Cause, her virginity is sacrificed. But then the rest of the group also loses their innocence when they kill their first "traitor", a collaborator with the Japanese, in a clueless, messy and protracted affair which horrifies Tang Wei so much that she leaves the group and doesn't see them again for 3 years, when she is recruited again (this time with the official backing of the Chinese Resistance) to resume her old identity and seduce Mr Yee for real.

More than a show which is just about falling in love with the enemy, then, it's a show about abandonment - Tang Wei is first, if not actively 'betrayed' by her friends, at least emotionally abandoned, when they don't mind sacrificing her virginity to the cause (and she's not supposed to mind either), and by Wang Leehom who kind of likes her but doesn't lift a finger to protect her emotionally in any way or give her any emotional support that's not just empty schoolboyish words, even though one gets the impression that she joined the Resistance movement at all largely because of him.

No surprises then that she finds herself becoming emotionally attached to Tony Leung's baddie, because although he's a baddie he's the only person who demonstrates any sort of passion for or interest in her! But is the desperate need to fulfil physical desire on his part really "love" either? Obviously not, and yet it's the closest to love she (and he too) can get. That is the real tragedy I guess.

And so after chewing over it I think the real "moral" of the story (haha, not that there's any one 'real moral' lah) is that women can come to love and become faithful to any man, even undeserving, cold and brutal ones who won't be faithful to them (like the one who just added me on Facebook). Sigh, we're such suckers.

* * *

And actually, after all that furore about the cut version etc etc and the debate about how integral the bedroom scenes were for the story, I think they weren't really that necessary after all for an understanding of the characters. They just served to elevate the pathos quotient of the film - underscoring the pathos that is sex without love, just for the sake of feeding an appetite which, without love, and lacking the proper conditions for love, can never be filled.

(Yup, I could have done without watching all those scenes, because prior to this I'd never watched such an explicit depiction of the act and wouldn't want to again. To me it seems that one's knowledge of these personal bodily functions ought to be confined to one's own experience in due course, no need for previews in the form of R-21 shows! Oh well, now I know better.)