Venice. Lust, Caution.

"Too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, a 2½-hour period drama that's a long haul for relatively few returns," writes Derek Elley for Variety. "Wartime Shanghai was far more realistically drawn in Lou Ye's Zhang Ziyi starrer Purple Butterfly, which also conveyed a stronger sense of resistance and collaborationist politics.... Lee's 40s Shanghai, though immaculately costumed, has a standard backlot look; the Hong Kong sequences, largely shot in Malaysia, are much more flavorsome."

"The Taiwanese director's adaptation of a novella by Eileen Chang is an uncompromising and incredibly seductive piece of filmmaking that is too long but has so many good elements going for it that it is hard to really care that on certain points the director seems to have thrown caution to the wind," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "Acting and technical credits are more than first-class and newcomer Wei Tang, starring alongside veteran Tony Leung, is simply riveting."

For the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett, Lust, Caution "brings to mind what soldiers say about war: that it's long periods of boredom relieved by moments of extremely heightened excitement.... The plot is much like Black Book, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's tale of a young Jewish woman who sleeps with a Nazi on behalf of the resistance, although it has none of the flair of that film."

Updates: "Had Lee accepted that his film is about the conflict between duty and desire, and worked smoothly on this premise, this could have been a far more focused and precise film," suggests Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "Hitchcock, whose work is mentioned several times in his picture, applied a similar approach to films such as Suspicion or Notorious (whose plot bears more than just a little resemblance to Chang's story). But by wishing to expand the story into a vast period portrait, first of Hong Kong, and then of Shanghai, Lee opens up avenues that he never has time to follow up."

"It would be no surprise if Ang Lee opted to cut it slightly, and perhaps clarified some early explanatory scenes," suggests the Telegraph's David Gritten. "But it must be a contender for major prizes here; Leung is once more an impossibly suave presence, and it's not too soon to proclaim Tang Wei in her first role as a new Gong Li in the making."

Update, 8/31: "It's a magnificent piece of filmmaking, albeit one that takes some time to click into gear," blogs Geoffrey Macnab at the Guardian. "Other directors condense huge novels into tidy 90-minute features. Lee's method is to take short stories and slowly expand them into epics." And as for the rating...

What is likely to make Lust, Caution difficult for the US censors to push under the carpet is its sheer artistry. This is palpably not an exploitation picture. The sex - which isn't shown until relatively late in the movie - is not gratuitous but is fundamental to the characterisation of the two leads. To cut it would be to undermine a core part of the storytelling. Thanks to Lee's reputation (topped by that directing Oscar for Brokeback Mountain), Lust, Caution now stands at least a chance of becoming one of the first NC-17 title to be taken seriously and contend for major awards. As a foreign language movie, it remains a tough sell. Nonetheless, you won't see many performances this year that are better than Tony Leung's chilling but melancholy turn as the mysterious Mr Yee.

Updates, 9/3: "Lee's new star Tang Wei is a revelation and a cert for Best Actress in her first film," writes the Observer's Jason Solomons. "Shot by Mexico's Rodrigo Prieto, this is a beautiful cinematic experience, an old-fashioned, handsome picture that nods to the seductive power of movies - posters for Destry Rides Again here, a clip of Ingrid Bergman sobbing there - indeed, it's on the way to the pictures that Leung first instructs his chauffeur to bring Wei to the secret apartment that will become their sex nest. Lust, Caution is like a Ming vase, though, and while it's a wondrous object to behold, it somehow lacks a sense of passion."

The BBC reports that, though Lee's sticking withthe NC-17 rating for the film's US release, he "will remove sex scenes from the thriller ahead of its release" in China.

Online listening tip. Eileen Chang translator Karen Kinsbury on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 9/10: Lust, Caution "is in a way the perfect blending of Ang Lee's two most popular films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain," proposes Time's Richard Corliss. "Like the first, it returns the Taiwanese native to China for a tale of political intrigue; like the second, it locates the passion, melancholy and power struggles of two complicated people.... Lust, Caution has not been so widely admired as Lee's other famous films. But it should be, for it mixes daring and delicacy with a master's touch."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at August 30, 2007 12:26 PM