Ang Lee's Lust, Caution and Its Reception

Abstract

This essay aims to gauge the different receptions of Ang Lee's recent film Lust, Caution between American and Chinese publics and across a cultural landscape of the pan-Chinese regions of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It also brings a contextual and historical dimension to bear on Ang Lee's intentions in making this film as well as on the differences of style and approach between Ang Lee and Eileen Chang, on whose original story the film is based. The essay pays particular attention to Ang Lee's diasporic background as a Chinese filmmaker from Taiwan with a cultural sensibility that makes his films not imitations of Hollywood products but manifestations of a particular sense of “repression” that stems from this background. Such symptoms of repression must be understood in terms of the historical context in which the story and film are based—Japanese Shanghai under the repressive collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei (1939–1945). The film's plot takes off directly from this context, which in turn informs Ang Lee's adaptation. The competing “structures of domination” come from two rivaling regimes of the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) as well as the Japanese military, which imprisons both the young heroine, a novice spy, and the villain, a security police chief of the “puppet” regime. Their sentimental and romantic entanglement, not pronounced in the original Eileen Chang story, bears a distinct trait of Ang Lee's directorial style as an artistic articulation of this sense of repression.

At the Pivot of East and West

“…The section of The Black Isle that covers the Japanese occupation of Singapore (1942Singapore ( -1945 takes on the feel of nightmare genres, and survivor strategies, of World War II through a series of literary allusions. There is, first, the noirish mood of World War II stories and films in both Europe and Asia, such as Eileen Chang's wartime stories Love in a Fallen City ([1943] 2007a) and Lust/Caution ([1979] 2007b), and their adaptations as films by Ang Lee (1984Lee ( , 2007. These are stories with facades of cosmopolitan gentility, veiling deadly games of sexual and political treachery.…”

Exhibitionism: Lust, Caution

“…For the sake of brevity, we may consider just the following Wa and Fu (2008). See also Lee (2008a By the time the film opened in China, some journalists there had already seen the complete version elsewhere, usually in Hong Kong. Thus accounts of what was missing from the China release became part of the publicity around the film.…”