Taglines: The Trap is Set.
Lust, Caution is based on a 26-page short story by famed Chinese writer Eileen Chang, is about a group of patriotic students who plot to assassinate the intelligence chief in the Japanese-backed Chinese government during the World War II era.
The film from Ang Lee, the Academy Award-winning director of “Brokeback Mountain” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” A startling erotic espionage thriller about the fate of an ordinary woman’s heart, it is based on the short story by revered Chinese author Eileen Chang, and stars Asian cinema icon Tony Leung opposite screen newcomer Tang Wei. Shanghai, 1942.
The World War II Japanese occupation of this Chinese city continues in force. Mrs. Mak, a woman of sophistication and means, walks into a café, places a call, and then sits and waits. She remembers… how her story began several years earlier, in 1938 China. She is not in fact Mrs. Mak, but shy Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei). With WWII underway, Wong has been left behind by her father, who has escaped to England. As a freshman at university, she meets fellow student Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom) Kuang has started a drama society to shore up patriotism.
As the theater troupe’s new leading lady, Wong realizes that she has found her calling, able to move and inspire audiences – and Kuang. He convenes a core group of students to carry out a radical and ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung).
Each student has a part to play; Wong will be Mrs. Mak, who will gain Yee’s trust by befriending his wife (Joan Chen) and then draw the man into an affair. Wong transforms herself utterly inside and out, and the scenario proceeds as scripted – until an unexpectedly fatal twist spurs her to flee.
Shanghai, 1941. With no end in sight for the occupation, Wong – having emigrated from Hong Kong – goes through the motions of her existence. Much to her surprise, Kuang re-enters her life.
Now part of the organized resistance, he enlists her to again become Mrs. Mak in a revival of the plot to kill Yee, who as head of the collaborationist secret service has become even more a key part of the puppet government. As Wong reprises her earlier role, and is drawn ever closer to her dangerous prey, she finds her very identity being pushed to the limit…
Director’s Introduction
To me, no story of Chan Ailing’s [Eileen Chang] is as beautiful or as cruel as “Lust, Caution.” She revised the story for years and years – for decades – returning to it as a criminal might return to the scene of a crime, or as a victim might re-enact a trauma, reaching for pleasure only by varying and re-imagining the pain. Making Lust, Caution, we didn’t really “adapt” Chan’s work, we re-enacted it, just as her characters act and re-enact their parts.
Chan describes the feeling Wong Chia Chi had after performing on stage as a young woman; the rush she felt afterwards, that she could barely calm down, even after a late-night meal with her friends from the theater and a ride on the upper deck of a tram.
When I read that, my mind raced back to my own first experience on the stage, back in 1973 at the Academy of Art in Taipei. The same rush of energy at the end of the play I had acted in; the same late-night camaraderie; the same wandering. I realized how that experience was central to Chan’s work, and how it could be transformed into film.
She understood play-acting and mimicry as something by nature brutal: animals, like her characters, use camouflage to evade their enemies and to lure their prey. But mimicry and performance are also ways we open ourselves, as human beings, to greater experience, to indefinable connections to others, to higher meanings, to art, and to the truth. — Ang Lee
Lust, Caution (2007)
Directed by: Ang Lee
Oyuncular Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Anupam Kher, Lee-Hom Wang, Chih Ying Chu, Su Yan, Caifei He, Leehom Wang
Screenplay by: Wang Hui-Ling, James Schamus
Production Design by: Lai Pan
Cinematography by: Rodrigo Prieto
Film Editing by: Tim Squyres
Art Direction by: Eric Lam Sai-Wan Lau Bill Lui Alex Mok
Makeup Department: Suyuan Chen
Music by: Alexandre Desplat
MPAA Rating: NC-17 for some explicit sexuality.
Distributed by: Focus Features
Release Date: September 28, 2007
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