Tony Leung stars in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution.
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Among the hot-ticket films that played Venice before Toronto: Ang Lee's steamy Lust, Caution, the Iraq war dramas Redacted and In the Valley of Elah, Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, the Bob Dylan fantasia I'm Not There. Clooney and Pitt stood on the red-carpeted podium outside the Sala Grande to promote their product. All the big Hollywood films were shown in Venice's first few days, so the stars and directors could return to North America and catch a breath before coming to Toronto.
In his four years at Venice, Mueller has slimmed the festival's official slate from more than 100 films to 55. That's more movies than most cinemaddicts would attend in a year, but they're spaced over the 10-day skein so that one person could theoretically see all of them. Venice offers civility as opposed to Toronto's genial anarchy, an Adriatic breeze before the whirlwind off Lake Ontario. Held on the Lido, the glamorous resort that's a 15min. boat ride from Venice, the festival is its own serene island of sophisticated moviegoing. In Toronto, you move from one film to another at an bustling, big-city pace. It's the difference between a leisurely banquet, catered with Italian elegance, and an urgent series of alpha-male mini-meals. I wouldn't want to do without either of them.
SHANGHAI SURPRISE
We come to these festive cities to be transported to other places, other sensibilities. In Lust, Caution it's Shanghai, 1942, where four Chinese ladies in the home of Mrs. Yee (Joan Chen) are deep in those twin devious pleasures, mahjong and gossip. What three of them don't know is that the fourth, Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei), is embarking on an affair with Mrs. Yee's husband (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a high-level government official collaborating with the occupying Japanese. Indeed, her name is not Mak Tai Tai but Wang Chia Chih, an operative of the underground Resistance. Her mission is to seduce and kill Yee.
A sumptuous Mata Hari melodrama that measures out its many luxurious over a 2-1/2hr. running time, Lust, Caution (from a short story by the late novelist and screenwriter Eileen Chang) is in a way the perfect blending of Ang Lee's two most popular films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. Like the first, it returns the Taiwanese native to China for a tale of political intrigue; like the second, it locates the passion, melancholy and power struggles of two complicated people. In a new book that includes the movie's original story, script and comments by the crew, assistant director Roseanna Ng calls Lust, Caution "another action movie," but with "no martial masters from different schools. ... All we had were one bed and two actors."
For all the care taken in period detail and psychological nuance, the film's big talking point is three startlingly intense scenes between Leung and Wang. Sex may not sell at the box office (audiences get enough of that in their home entertainment), but it's news at film festivals. And Lee knows how to stoke feverish whispers. When at Venice he was asked if the actors engaged in actual sex, he impishly replied, "Have you seen the film?"
The two actors certainly go at it, with a fierce energy that was finally exhausted after 11 days shooting the three scenes. But whether or not they Did It doesn't matter as much as what they reveal of their characters while they're doing it. The first encounter is described in the script as "more or less a rape" — his will to dominate grinding down her stubbornness to survive long enough to get her revenge. In a later tryst, she moans in real or mock pleasure, while he goes silently about his work. Then he curls her body into his and finally makes an enigmatic but revealing little noise. They have connected. And when he begins to desire her, she can begin to use him. These are things we couldn't feel so strongly if they were expressed in dialogue or a kiss. Lee knows that sex, in movies, can be as eloquent as a knife to the heart.
Leung usually plays sympathetic loners, as in Hero and Infernal Affairs, the film that inspired Martin Scorsese's The Departed (Leung played the Leonardo DiCaprio part). Here he's hard, knowing and Freon-cool, and as ruthless in bed as in interrogating a Resistance suspect. As for the previously unknown Tang Wei, she's not a big-eyed cutie like those three-China favorites Faye Wong or Vicky Zhao Wei. She's more in the fashion of the sour beauties of Shanghai's film and music scene in the 40s. Her style and sensuality have to be discovered, peeled off layer by layer, as Yee does to Wang in the movie.
Though Lust, Caution won the top prize at Venice, it has not been so widely admired by critics as Lee's other famous films. But it should be, for it mixes daring and delicacy with a master's touch. Toronto has got off to a good start with Lee's elegant, erotic movie — his own Brokeback Bedroom.