Such a long wait, for such a flat result

Ang Lee likes to try different things. He made The Ice Storm, and The Hulk. And Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And right after Brokeback Mountain—which, as Nathan Lee memorably declared in Film Comment, gave "millions of 'mos on the planet. . .in no uncertain terms, the epic romantic tragedy straight people have taken for granted all their lives"—Lee has given us the constipated, dryly "shocking" historical hetero thriller Lust,Caution—a film ironically accurate in its name.

This adaptation of a long Eileen Chang story is a movie about Chinese spies under 1940's Japanese occupation focused on a heterosexual affair that is not epic and is without love or tragedy or romance or even sexiness. It is a tragedy, or a tragic waste of time for a doomed young woman, Wang Jia-hi (newcomer Tang Wei) and her group of young provincial actors who want to kill Chinese collaborators. Jiajhi, masquerading as somebody else of more bourgeois background, has an affair with Tony Leung's collabo police chief, Mr. Yee.

Their sex scenes are (sort of) brutal and (sort of) graphic--enough for an NC-17 rating but not enough to be shocking or a turn-on (as if brutality or overtness were any key to that); and the sex, however unconventional it may be within the staid historical context, doesn't begin till a lot of screen time has passed. Ang Lee's scenes are (generically) handsome and finely crafted as always, but his pace is leaden. If he wanted to give straight love a bad name compared to the excitement that so briefly but memorably happens between Jake and Heath, he succeeded. That certainly was not his conscious intention, but the painful literalism of Lee's sex scenes this time are like the Kama Sutra acted out by gawky, self-conscious teenagers.

The obvious interest of Jiajhi's story isn't in any physicality or even in the suspense and danger. It's in how a Mata Hari lover who's a virgin when she and her young actor troupe hatch their plan (comically, she must learn sex from a guy whose limited experience is with prostitutes)—discovers this is, like it or not, the love of her life—and how long and how terribly she might struggle with that realization. How can she be jaded or objective as her role requires her to be? How does she deal with the awful combination of love and hate she's saddled with? These are complex questions. But the young actress, though game, isn't subtle; and Lee gets too involved in mahjong-playing ladies, handsome interiors, shiny period cars, and complex street scenes, all of which, especially the street scenes, are wonderfully crafted in their dry, pretty way, but not essential to the story.

Also detrimental is the choice of Leung, who's already been far cooler and more romantic in various Wong Kar Wai classics. What we need is an actor who's more cruel, more venial, more physical, less long-suffering and ascetic and elegant, for this role—someone who would seem more scary and sensual throwing Jiajhi around in bed. Too much caution, not enough lust. When Jiajhi's handsome young acting mentor, Kuang Yu Min (Wang Lee-Hom), finally kisses her, Jiajhi says, "You could have done that three years ago." That's the trouble with the whole movie. It takes too long and says too little to us and its ending is flat. So much beauty, so much elegant filmmaking, for such a pinched and constipated result: it's a real pity. Rent Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love instead.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.