For spies, 'Lust' isn't everything ;Lust caution

Not just to embody but to act the throes of passion, with every inch of flesh exposed - that's what first-time movie actress Tang Wei does to the hilt, and way beyond the hilt, in Lust, Caution, Ang Lee's otherwise ponderous tale of intrigue in Japanese-controlled Shanghai during the Second World War.

Tang Wei brings a terrible and awe-inspiring purity to an impure character: the key performer in a patriotic theater cell that becomes an assassination unit for the Chinese Resistance. At its best, the film presents a nightmare case of a performer getting lost in her role. The target of her seduction, a married collaborator and secret service chief played by Tony Leung, takes charge of their sexual relationship in a repulsive rape.

But Tang Wei holds you, first with her character's willingness to eroticize anything, even rape, for the sake of her cause, and then with her reluctant but real lust. As this dangerous liaison expands, her bed becomes an arena for extreme variations on conquest, fear, desire, even love.
For about a quarter of an hour of this unendurably long movie, she and Leung stir up an amorous whirlpool. In the film's one minute of verbal brilliance, she pleads for help from her Resistance boss:

"He not only gets inside me, but he worms his way into my heart," she says with a bloodcurdling urgency. "I take him in like a slave. I play my part loyally, so I too can get inside him. And every time he hurts me until I bleed and scream ... before he feels alive. In the dark, only he knows it's all true. That's why I can torture him until he can't take it any longer, and I will keep going until I can't go anymore."

The rest of the film is so ceremonious and dull, it's as if Lee emerged from these sessions similarly spent. Expanding on Eileen Chang's 48-page short story of the same name, Lee wants to craft a variation on Hitchcock's great Notorious - an NC-17, morally ambiguous version in which there is no substitute for Cary Grant, and Ingrid Bergman's shady lady actually falls in love with Claude Rains' Nazi.

But Lee, always a plodder, lets the tension shrivel and the ardor go slack. His big ideas, like staging a horrendously clumsy fight to the death to reveal the horror of all violence, are old and lame - though to be fair, moviegoers have such short memories that they hailed David Cronenberg for similar would-be feats in Eastern Promises. (They all derive from a scene in Hitchcock's otherwise atrocious Torn Curtain.) Lee ultimately tenderizes and sentimentalizes the central relationship with a tender song. And he fails to make the political goals of the woman's cadre cogent and compelling - a disaster for a story in which, as Chang's translator, Julia Lovell, notes, "irrational emotional reality" wins out over "tidy political abstraction." In Lee's Lust, Caution, that's a Pyrrhic victory.