Ang Lee's beautiful but studied Lust, Caution offers an Asian take on Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II, with a naïve young student pretending to be a high-society woman in order to seduce—and set up—a collaborator serving as the puppet regime's security chief. The big difference is that the two engage repeatedly in rough sex, explicit enough to earn the picture an NC-17 rating, and the film also includes a long and nasty sequence illustrating how very difficult it can be to kill a man. Lust, Caution succeeds not so much as an espionage thriller or a romance, but as an exercise in visually extravagant technique. It won't make your pulse race or engage your emotions—the pace is much too deliberate over the course of nearly three hours and the performances are far too controlled (Tang Wei is like an alabaster statue come to life as the young woman impersonating a businessman's wife, and Tony Leung is impassive as her target)—but if you surrender to the film's leisurely rhythms and odd combination of restraint and abrupt paroxysms of passion, you may well find it intoxicating. Recommended. [Note: Available in either the original NC-17 version or an R-rated version, DVD extras include the 17-minute behind-the-scenes featurette “Tiles of Deception, Lurid Affections,” and trailers. Bottom line: a small extras package for a beautiful if also slowly-paced film.] (F. Swietek)
[Blu-ray Review—February 17, 2021—Kino Lorber, 157 min., in Mandarin w/English subtitles, NC-17, Blu-ray: $29.95—Making its debut on Blu-ray, 2007’s “Lust, Caution” is presented with a beautiful transfer. Extras include audio commentary by film historian Eddy Von Mueller, and the “making-of” featurette “Tiles of Deception & Lurid Affections.” Bottom line: A film that split critics (a common quip was that it was more caution than lust), Ang Lee’s controversial erotic thriller benefits from a luminous transfer.]