Lust, Caution, an Ang Lee film

Ang Lee won his second 'Leone d'oro' for 'Lust, Caution' at the Venice Film Festival 2007, in three years. Nigel Andrew the Financial Times of London film high priest snidely called it a 'shagfest'. Readers of this excellent paper will find his review of the film in the 3 January 2008 of a finer and different appreciation, worthy of 5 stars. Ang Lee is a superior film maker who with his collaborators turn short stories into major, majestic films. In 'Lust, Caution' he has taken Eileen Chang's 60 page story, and transformed it into a 153 minute film, so rich and dark that it rivets the viewer to his seat. The chemistry of love is difficult to distill but here Ang Lee turns blind passion and will into the gold alchemists dream of. The passion is highly physical and intense and brutual, serving the intrigue during the Japanese war against China, between a collaborator and a radical student young woman who with her friends seek to kill him. One is reminded of the song Marlene Dietrich sang in 'Der Blaue Engel' [the blue angel], 'Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe angestellt' [I am made for love]. In 'Lust, Caution', the metaphor is not that of a moth to a flame, but one of a Chinese song of the 1930's, of a needle and a threat, but the denouement is nonetheless tragic. The ending is otherwise, but 18Brumaire suggests his readers see Lee's film. Eileen Chang knew of what she wrote, having survived a husband who collaborated; her writing career suffered because the grand high priests of China studies, like the old men in Mao's Beijing, dismissed her work as 'reactionary' and 'anti patriotic'. She died a broken woman but her small literary legacy is truer to the times than the Potemking novels which routinely followed Mao's footprint of literature and art for the workers and peasants. Chang was true to herself as Lee is true to her in his great film!