As a pub­lic ser­vice, The Dork Report would like to issue a warn­ing to any­one that may have picked up on the mar­ket­ing of Se, jie (Lust, Cau­tion) as an NC-17 erotic thriller. One might imag­ine that the lat­est film from the direc­tor of Sense & Sen­si­bil­ity and Eat Drink Man Woman would be a sexy drama suit­able for view­ing with a sig­nif­i­cant other, but be warned that the sex scenes are mostly far from tit­il­lat­ing. In fact, the first of three sex scenes can only be clas­si­fied as a rape (albeit one com­pli­cated by the char­ac­ters’ com­plex relationship).

Se, jie is set in 1942 Japanese-occupied Shang­hai, with flash­backs to the few years pre­ced­ing. A naïve but sin­cerely ded­i­cated bunch of Chi­nese stu­dent activists form a ter­ror­ist cell, with an aim to assas­si­nate col­lab­o­ra­tor Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). The­ater stu­dent Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang) dis­cov­ers she is a nat­ural actress and gifted impro­viser, which unfor­tu­nately also makes her a superbly qual­i­fied as a under­cover spy.

A scene from Ang Lee’s “Deceive Rape Man Woman”

But to fully inhabit her cover story as a mar­ried woman, she must first lose her vir­gin­ity. Tthis hap­pens almost simul­ta­ne­ously with her cell los­ing their metaphor­i­cal vir­gin­ity as they mess­ily exe­cute their first right­eous assas­si­na­tion. Like Paul New­man dis­cov­ers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Cur­tain, mur­der is hard work, and takes time.

Se, jie was released in the same year as Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book and con­cerns many of the same themes: wartime occu­pa­tion and resis­tance, and the use of sex as under­cover ingra­ti­a­tion. But while Ver­ho­even couldn’t resist front-loading his film with plenty of cheese­cake, Ang Lee and James Schamus take the high road and don’t pre­tend that the morally empty Mr. Yee isn’t vio­lently twisted, and that Wong Chia Chi doesn’t absolutely suf­fer for her cause.

This blog is rated NC-17 for pub­lish­ing naughty film stills

Offi­cial movie site: www.filminfocus.com/lustcaution

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Tweet

Related Posts:

1. 
   Sex and the City
2. 
   The Reader
3. 
   A Tall Tale: Taking Woodstock