maybe it sounds better in chinese?

the title 'lust, caution' is a bit off-putting, at best. on the other hand, it's an uncomfortable title, and that certainly matches the rest of the film. ah. i just read that the chinese title is an unstranslateable pun. makes sense.

it starts off with a little mahjohng, always nice. four catty, wealthy chinese ladies trading veiled barbs under the guise of leisure. joan chen, perfect as usual. leave it to her to snag a husband like tony leung. although i suppose it wasn't exactly a marriage built in heaven, so i'll try not to hold a grudge. like the title, the mahjohng doesn't translate, as some of those tiles seemed to be pretty ominous, and that last one was apparently hilarious.

it's a beautiful film. everything looks like those vintage haruki murakami cover designs. the lead actress' sideburns are quite impressive. tony leung gets in a fair bit of eye-raping in the first half an hour, and wei tang gives it right back to him, morphing from innocent schoolgirl into dragon lady with the puff of a cigarette. it's really just one step -- co-ed to spy. and lest you think it, this is not a 'fun' spy movie. this ain't julia child. (as to that, though, i was under the impression that we all knew that already...)

really, the film moves along at a nice little clip, not feeling at all like it clocks in at well over two hours. there's action, violence, romance...well, sex. i can see why a few feathers were ruffled over the sex. am i the only one to whom it all seemed a bit...donald sutherland and julie christie? but ickier? the thing is, i'm not sure that it added anything to the film. his behavior in these scenes certainly didn't clarify why she felt the way she did about him, if anything it made it less clear. he seemed very much to be a bad bad man.

there were a number of things that detracted from the film overall besides the explicit sex -- such as the mildly slapdash ending and lack of much character development.

for years i've thought i was a big ang lee fan, but he's just a bit too hit or miss. 'the wedding banquet', 'eat drink man woman', 'sense and sensibility', 'the ice storm' -- immensely enjoyable. i turned off 'brokeback mountain' five minutes before the end, because, whatever was going to happen to the characters, i didn't care. they were bland -- this may have come from the short story, but i don't see how stretching it into a two hour film made things any better. 'hulk'....i can't see that. 'crouching tiger, hidden dragon' -- unfortunately, it pales in retrospect because of the immediate influx of copycat films.

i'll see what he does next. but given my track record with his films, he's simply not a director whose work i will see simply because he directed it.

but man oh man, those sex scenes are somethin' else.