Throwing 'Lust, Caution' to the wind

TORONTO - From its mysteriously inverted title to its twisty spy movie plot, "Lust, Caution" evokes the tensions that simmered just beneath the surface of Shanghai during the Japanese occupation in World War II.

But for Ang Lee, the Chinese-born director whose adaptation of a story about love between two men brought his first Oscar last year for "Brokeback Mountain," this latest attempt to show love as an act of fateful self-deception was even more daring. Based on Eileen Chang's short story, the film, which opens Friday, has less to do with the takeover of Shanghai than the forcible occupation of the human heart.

Before he read Chang's story, Lee had never encountered a character like Wong Chia Chi - the mahjong Mata Hari played in the film by newcomer Tang Wei - in Chinese literature.

"It has a lot to do with a woman's sexuality, their psychology, what they get from sex," Lee said during an interview at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where "Lust, Caution" had its North American premiere. "So it was very shocking. At the same time, she's evoking fearful thoughts and feelings about occupying, and about being occupied. Particularly the latter, about being occupied in the man-woman relationship."

A member of her university's drama society, Wong is drawn into a plot to assassinate one of the leaders of the collaborationist government working with the Japanese. She is cast by her co-conspirators in the role of Mrs. Mak, who plays
mahjong and gossips with the wives of the traitorous regime's leaders.
Wong befriends the doyenne of this brat pack (Joan Chen) so that she can seduce the woman's husband, the treacherous Mr. Yee (Hong Kong star Tony Leung), director of the government's feared intelligence service.

"She's basically a good girl playing bad girls, and finding her power there," Lee says. "And the thing that moved me tremendously is that I totally identified with the girl, who gets to touch her true self by playing a part. Like her, I started on the stage, and it changed my life. It told me that there is real life, and there is the true life, that's somewhere else, in the opposite direction."

After considering as many as 10,000 applicants for the part, Lee was both excited and terrified when he realized that he had found the perfect actress to play Wong in Tang, who had never been in a feature film before, much less carried one.

"I believed in her because, in real life, she seemed like a person from my parents' generation," Lee says. "I felt she can be a spokesman for me."

Tang, then 26 and a recent finalist in Beijing's Miss Universe pageant, auditioned for the role without knowing much about Lee's plan to make the love scenes so intense - and sexually explicit - that the movie would eventually be released with an NC-17 rating. In that way, Tang and Ang were entering into a similarly secretive sort of relationship as Wong and Yee.

"That's me," Lee says. "I never tell."

"At the last audition, Ang told me something about love scenes," Tang said at the Toronto festival, sometimes speaking in English, sometimes through an interpreter. "But he didn't tell me a lot, just that they would be a bit more daring. No details."

As it became increasingly apparent that she and Leung would be called upon to shed their inhibitions and their clothes for the strenuous lovemaking that dominates the final third of the film, Tang says she simply left her body behind and occupied the character's. "From the very beginning, I removed myself," she says. "I tried to forget Tang Wei. Tried to forget everything, and just enter the character.

"Of course, I felt a little nervous at the beginning," she adds. "I'm a girl, and I'm not used to this. It was the first time I did a play like this. But when the camera was rolling, I am the girl. I just live the girl's life."

The connection between the director and the ingenue Tang was portraying was so close that if the actress' concentration wavered for even an instant, he seemed to feel it before she did.

"Sometimes when all he could see was my back," she recalls, "if I'm not completely in the character, Ang would say, 'You're not in Wong now.' And if I'm in the character, whatever I do, Ang always says it's right."

Lee brought another young Chinese actress to prominence in the West when he cast Zhang Ziyi as one of the leads in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," his last Chinese-language film before "Lust, Caution." But the gamble is greater with Tang.

"She has to carry the movie," Lee says, "so I was more intense with her. When we approached the first day of shooting, I was very nervous."

Confident that he has made the movie he wanted, he was pleased when Focus Features never asked him to trim the film to get a less restrictive rating. Or to satisfy some early critics who have suggested the movie is too long. When Lee accepted the Venice Film Festival's award for best picture, the Golden Lion, he was booed in the press room.

"Believe me, I tried to make it shorter," he says. "But it's a Chinese film. I just have to do what feels right. American audiences have been trained by the movies to get restless if something doesn't happen every nine minutes. What's the hurry? It frustrates me a lot."

With a running time of more than 2 1/2 hours, subtitles, a period drama and lots of kinky sex, "Lust" throws caution to the wind. Now Lee is waiting to see if the critics throw him to the wolves.