Adroit Lee

by RICHARD JONES

ACADEMY AWARD winning director Ang Lee has finally returned to China in his latest epic Lust, Caution set in Shanghai during World War 2.

Wong Chin Chi (Tang Wei) is an undercover agent who's decided to put her body and soul on the line for her homeland. It's her task to seduce a prominent political figure and set him up for assassination.

The target is Mr Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) a leading Chinese collaborator with the occupying Japanese military forces.

Mr Yee heads up the local secret police and reports directly to his Japanese bosses so any slip-up by Wong Chin Chi will be fatal.

Gradually the love affair blossoms from Yee's early sadistic approaches as the two people find themselves more and more drawn to each other in the fraught political and social atmosphere of the period.

Lust, Caution is an intense, slow-burning film containing scenes of sexual frankness.

It's not always comfortable viewing, but Ang Lee explores questions of morality, patriotism and politics with the adroitness he showed in Brokeback Mountain.

29 April 2008

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