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 naive 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

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Written by Chad Ossman

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Movie (DVD). You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.