Lust, Caution.

For the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas, Lust, Caution "plays like the kind of rough assembly that directors sometimes screen for studio executives and trusted confidants when they're mid-way through the editing process. It is, I think, a work of extraordinary hubris - the kind of megalomaniacal enterprise that can spring forth from a director coming off of a major critical and commercial hit (in [Ang] Lee's case, Brokeback Mountain) and allowed by producers to indulge his every whim."

It's "a kind of reverse Notorious," suggests Robert Cashill. "Not to spoil anything, but imagine that the Ingrid Bergman character in the classic Hitchcock picture decided to bail on Cary Grant and ally herself with Claude Rains and his neo-Nazi scheming. That roughly approximates the storyline of the film, which should have emerged as perverse but instead registers as sloggy and distasteful."

Updated through 10/1.

"Yawns were no sooner stifled in the Lush, Comatose screening room when word arrived from the Venice Film Festival that Se Jie, as it's called in Chinese, had tamed the Golden Lion," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Whether or not jury president Zhang Yimou was stirred by patriotism or merely a boob, I'm amazed he convinced fellow jurist Paul Verhoeven to throw support behind a film he'd already made in Black Book - which has twice the passion and way better beaver shots." More from Robert Wilonsky, who finds it'd have been better "boiled down to half its running time."

"Lee's attempt to do a revisionist version of a World War II film - with Japanese-occupied China subbing for Nazi-occupied France and charged-up young resistance fighters trying to snare a collaborationist Chinese kingpin (Tony Leung) - is overall a failure, albeit with tell-tale moments of dazzling creativity," blogs Howard Karren at In the Company of Glenn.

"Wong and Mr Yee's sexual trysts give Lust, Caution an interesting psychological nuance," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Tang, an actress with a great future, gives haunting expression to Wong's conflictions and sense of entrapment, even as the film begins to give pathetic leverage to the notion that diamonds are a girl's best friend."

"Paul Verhoeven's Black Book had a similar scenario (Resistance lass seduces Axis bigwig), but the heroine's Gestapo lover was a sweetie under those jackboots and swastikas," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Leung's Yee has been coarsened by presiding over tortures and executions, and those bad habits come out in the bedroom. He knows that Tai Tai might be a spy - he has ferreted out other would-be lovers/assassins. But the risk brings him out of his paranoid-authoritarian little shell."

"If Lee's methods are restrained and conservative, his subsequent career choices have nonetheless exhibited a persistent dedication to risk-taking," writes Nick Schager at IFC News. "Lust, Caution doesn't significantly renovate or subvert spy movie conventions or expectations. During its steamy, highly charged centerpieces, though, it does radically upend the director's usual nippy detachment."

"Like the fight sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the sex scenes in Lust, Caution push the story into increasingly feverish and complex directions," writes Anthony Kaufman. "Explicit, yes, but utterly necessary, to depict the use and abuse, or l'amour fou (depending on how you look at it), between the characters."

"Lust, Caution revolves around a plot, like a thriller, and we try to read it like that; but it also revolves around character and nature, like a drama, and we see it through that perspective," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi. "The movie - and the audience - jumps from intimate drama to glossy thrills." And an online listening tip: James talks with Lee.

For a long backgrounder in the Los Angeles Times, Paul Lieberman talks with Lee and Leung.

Logan Hill talks with Lee for New York.

Nathaniel R's got pix of the Taiwan premiere.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Update, 9/26: "Lee and his collaborators (including, here as elsewhere, screenwriters James Schamus and Wang Hui-Ling) have built a pedigreed short story up into a Ralph Bellamy of a period piece: forgettably handsome and sympathetic to a fault," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

Updates, 9/27: In "Ang Lee's cunningly effective new period piece, the two main characters contort and distend across bed sheets with serpentine intensity, their motions caught in unvarnished close-up," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "Every move in these hypnotically immersive scenes informs the story, imbuing it with an authentic sense of drama that gives the film a distinctly menacing tone. What might seem like gratuity is actually a strikingly eloquent form of psychological expressionism."

"It's the real Eastern Promise - the movie Ang Lee has always been working toward," writes Armond White. Also in the New York Press, Jennifer Merin talks with Lee.

Erica Abeel interviews Lee for indieWIRE.

Updates, 9/28: "Lust, Caution - a truer title would be 'Caution: Lust' - is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Like too many films that try to put a human face on history without really engaging with it, Lust, Caution feels at once overpadded and underdeveloped: it's all production design and not enough content." In an accompanying audio slide show, Lee discusses the film.

"For nearly an hour, Lust, Caution plays like an exceedingly well-made but conventional wartime spy drama," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "But when the student group's plans are foiled by a sudden act of violence, which Lee shows us in a mercilessly protracted scene, the film turns into something rawer and stranger.... In the end, the movie suggests, both politics and love may be inseparable from the lies we tell ourselves about them."

"For more than a decade, Lee has been quietly building an impressive canon about the erotic experience," writes Sarah Hepola. "Sex isn't really the throughline of Ang Lee's films; after all, he did direct Sense & Sensibility. Instead, his running theme is the conflict between what a person wants and what society deems acceptable." Also at Nerve, Gwynne Watkins: "Ang Lee's espionage drama unfolds as a luxurious period piece, but by the end, its loose coils have been pulled as taut as a hangman's noose."

"Conceptually, Lust, Caution has been thoroughly thought-through, down to every lipstick stain Wei leaves on her teacups," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "And maybe that's what keeps the film from becoming truly affecting."

"I got the impression, here and throughout Lust, Caution, that director Ang Lee just arbitrarily set up his shots without much consideration for what they meant," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "His only concern is the story, not the art behind it."

"I went into the screening with trepidation. The trepidation was not necessary," writes Marcy Dermansky. "Lust, Caution is a gorgeous film, sweeping you away to a different time and place." And Jürgen Fauth argues, "The story simply wouldn't add up if we hadn't seen what happens between Tony Leung and Wei Tang during the NC-17 scenes."

In the Los Angeles Times, Lorenza Muñoz reports that many hope the film will help dissolve the stigma of the NC-17 rating: "'If Ang Lee does well, then maybe others will follow and we can get rid of these myths that have created challenges for this rating,' said John Fithian, president of the National Assn of Theatre Owners."

The NYC premiere on Thursday has become ST VanAirsdale's "favorite red-carpet event of the year."

Online listening tip. Lee's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 10/1: Via Movie City News, Anthony Kaufman gets Lee to list his five favorite "favorite dark film romances" for the Wall Street Journal.

Posted by dwhudson at September 25, 2007 2:06 PM