Lust, Caution

I finally went to see “Lust, Caution” this weekend after hearing everyone talked about it. I found a full house in a small movie theater near Princeton. About one third of the audience were Chinese, and most of the rest were American senior citizens who perhaps attracted by the wartime story. It was horrific time beyond the imagination of the younger generations who were born after WWII. The wounds are so deep that they don’t even want to talk about it.

When Ang Lee makes a film, he wants to get into the characters’ psyches—the Victorian women in Sense and Sensibility, or the gay cowboys in Broke Back Mountain. Here he was telling the story of a group of naïve, idealistic and patriotic students who tried to assassinate high ranking Japanese collaborators. The young actress Wei Tang gave an exceptional performance playing a seductress (Wang Chia Chi) to Tony Leung who played the head of the intelligence of the collaborator government. In fact, I will give her an Oscar if she did fake some of the love scenes.

“For heart is an organ of fire,” Almacy wrote that in The English Patient. Many times when we let our heart go on a journey, we thought we could control it but we really can’t. The talented Wong Chia Chi wanted to give her body to the devil for her country but ended up giving up her soul.

It was an extreme dark era of human history and Ang Lee painted a very dark picture. It was the time when cruelty, betrayal, torture, and murder are common place. Ang Lee took the audience through the journey of the college students from an ordinary gathering to a dark deep abyss in the end. For heart is an organ of fire, I give it four stars.