Console
best movie i've ever seen.
Janae Milner
Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.
Fleur
Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.
Jill Wisoff (FantasyCreatureFilmsLLC)
Someone pointed out to me that on this date, July 7, 1937, the Japanese attacked Nanjing, murdering 300,000 civilians. This was the beginning of the Japanese war on China. I reflected on this and thought back to those hours in a movie theater on Houston Street in NYC where Ang Lee was attending a screening of his new film, Lust/Caution. I remembered the opening scene, a group of women sitting around a table playing mah jongg, and immediately knew I was watching a master work by this director. Not a note of the film was out of place, not the direction, cinematography, editing, performances. Not the devastating conclusion. Though years have passed, the film remains in my memory much the way my first viewing of La Strada or The Seventh Seal do. It is a film anyone who appreciates master work by a great filmmaker should see in their lifetime, uncut. It is a film as well that captures the essence of the atrocities of that war, the sacrifices, the brutalities. It is a heartbreakingly skewed love story and war story that will resonate long after you experience it. I do believe it should enter the recognized canon of greatest films ever made.
chaos-rampant
The exercise here seems to be the layered portrait of a woman (an actress) unsure of herself. There is a lot of other stuff thrown in with Hong Kong and Shanghai in the grip of war, spying and politics, that is basically broadening the canvas with enough life to make the main image more lush and lifelike as opposed to a dry examination, bring clarity to it as something we unearth from a busy world. It is what Wong Kar Wai does in his films when stretching time, though not exactly the same.That image is actually an image of her, shown twice.That is where she's talking on the phone in the cafe, more sensually memorable when moments later she puts on perfume. The first time it happens we know close to nothing of her, except an implied affair with Mr. Lee, stolen from glances like in a Wong Kar Wai film. The second time near the end we know everything, again she talks on the phone and puts on perfume but now everything's changed, we know who both are and what is to be done.In between this mirrored image is the bulk of the film, all that fleshing out of the world and her as memory that shifts our position in the story by shifting what we know of the situation. It drags for me but there's a payoff in the end.Here's very clearly how it works in the film, it's clever stuff. If you have seen just the first part leading up to the phonecall, and the last part resuming from the phonecall until the end, in that part of the story after she has fallen in love, her actions make sense.In that part, Mr. Lee is just a sweet, taciturn man, not unlike the husband Tony Leung played in Mood for Love. Why'd she do it?But you have seen everything else, known him with more depth as an unpleasant man and can't unknow him, unless that is if you excuse the film as erotic. So you question her judgment of allowing herself to be seduced, as do her puzzled comrades in the firing squad line.She an actress, he a watcher.Her initially acting in the theater, later having to act in life, in the mahjong games with rich bored housewives, as the mistress. He watches, cautious at first but steadily drawn in. She is drawn by him watching, later forcing his way into her performance.It's not far from Wong Kar Wai's later films, which go back to Bertollucci's Last Tango to Vertigo (better yet, Nabokov's Lolita), where a man and woman, he is usually older and experienced, create between them a space of obsessive passion, where names and identity dissolve.Lee has done it halfway between Kar Wai and Bertolluci, shifting from coy glances to lots and lots of sex—but if you are fooled by it, you are fooled as she is, seduced because it's erotic.The point in all cases? That space ruled by nameless desire which may seem more pure and sometimes we covet in life, where we won't have to be who we are, is in fact more illusory, desire bents the shape of things into what is desired of them to be. As in a film noir, where desire (coded in the femme fatale) fools with the narrator's reality.On all this topics as well as main story, Lee inserts Hitchcock's film noir Suspicion which our heroine sees in the theater—a film where a young girl wonders whether her charming man may not be a murderer, and a studio tacked-on (meaning false) ending puts her mind at ease.Linked in all cases with memory as the untrustworthy desire to bend the life we choose to recall, it is a purely cinematic subject, where again there's the escape into something more pure than just life, but it's an illusory ecstacy, light poured on canvas. Enchanting for a while, but the lights have to come back on again.So why'd she do it? Because all that she knows about him is abstract when he touches her, the touch is real.So Lee has compromised, in this as in others of his films, it is half a great film in a rather ordinary package. You can kid yourself with the story, whereas not in 2046. But if it leads even one person into likeminded filmmakers who work outside producer constraints, it was all worth it.
Desertman84
This is a great movie.It is one of Ang Lee's best films.It definitely ranks together with Brokeback Mountain.Tony Leung never disappoints.While newcomer,Wei Tang is definitely a charmer.The story was great. It was about Clearly,the Wei Tang character named Wong Chia Chi/Mak Tai Tai,who was suffering from a psychological disorder as she was asked to be a spy for a war collaborator,played excellently by Leung.I do believe that is was a case of a Stockholm Syndrome.Her personal and family background did help contribute to that psychological disorder. This has nothing to do with her being a woman.Stockholm syndrome affects both men and women!!! Some complained about having too many sex scenes.Those scenes were essential not to satisfy perverts but to completely understand Wong Chia Chi/Mak Tai Tai's character;her psychological make-up; and why she did it at the end of the movie.
Danusha_Goska Save Send Delete
"Lust Caution" is a big, fat melodrama with two small, lifeless gimmicks where its heart and mind should be. It's the story of a young, beautiful Chinese spy who, implausibly, must seduce a Japanese collaborator in order to set him up for assassination. The question that is meant to keep you watching through endless, empty, boring, setup: Will the would-be assassin fall in love with her quarry, a man she is forced to bed? "Lust Caution" has the production values of a superior melodrama: stitch-perfect vintage costumery: Chinese qi pao, Japanese geisha, and Western power suits and boxy shoulders; big, fat, vintage automobiles, shiny with chrome; and recreated cities of Japanese-occupied 1940s China. This film will satisfy viewers whose only demand of a movie be that it be luscious to look at.The problem is the ersatz gift underneath all those ribbons and inside all that crepe wrapping paper. The movie has no heart, and it has no head. The first hour and a half are unbearably boring and empty. I watched the mahjong scenes a couple of times to make sure I wasn't missing anything. They establish the superficiality of the Chinese collaborators' wives. That could have been accomplished much more quickly. The point of the scenes: look at this Chinese woman's perfect manicure, look at this big, fat ring, look at this silk qi pao. There's nothing there to engage anything other than the eyes.The film's two gimmicks: will the would-be assassin fall in love with her quarry, an utterly despicable man who, the film makes clear, tortures and murders Chinese freedom fighters during his long days at work, "at the office." The second gimmick: graphic sex scenes. In online reviews, some of the film's viewers assume that the act is not simulated, but genuine.Japan, of course, committed wartime atrocities every bit as horrific as those committed by the Nazis. They just committed their crimes farther away from Western news cameras. I won't detail here the nightmares the Japanese created in cities like Nanking; Iris Chang, among others, uncovered these hidden atrocities."Lust Caution" has chosen a monster for its lead. In bed, though, this torturer is one of the world's great lovers. His masterful feats of lovemaking are so acrobatic you'll not be sure if you're viewing a page from the Kama Sutra or a metaphor invoking ramen noodles.I'd really like to sit director Ang Lee down and ask him a question. Why did you cast actor Tony Leung, handsome, tender, and charismatic, as a torturer? Do you really think real life torturers looked anything like Tony Leung? Leung cannot hide the facial expressions of a human, decent, lovable guy. He is not the best choice to depict a man hardened by years of the kind of tortures that the Japanese performed. Yes, being a professional torturer shows on the face. Look at the faces of professional torturers. They don't look like tender lovers. They don't look like Tony Leung.All of this nonsense could have at least been entertaining, but it's not. "Lust Caution" has a single-digit IQ, no soul, and a glacial pace. In addition to be grotesque, it commits the cardinal sin of a popular entertainment. It is almost too boring to sit through.
