I prepared for going to see this film by chairing a meeting on the estate in which we discussed caretaker duty rotas and dog excrement in more detail than one would prefer. In a vague way I like to think of it as establishing the foundations of a bastion of working class power. Quite an imaginative leap is generally required. On the other hand the undercurrent of glamorous, pulsating sexual tension was a bit like what was to follow on the screen.
The young Chinese revolutionaries in Ang Lee’s new film Lust Caution don’t spend their time sitting in unheated community centres on January evenings. Their political activity begins with staging patriotic plays to raise money for the anti-Japanese resistance. It’s never made explicit but there are enough hints for you to work out that they are probably Kuomintang supporters. From theatre performances they decide on the obvious next step and agree to infiltrate a prominent collaborator’s home and kill him. Nothing that most readers of this site haven’t done.
One thing leads to another and one of the young women, played by Wei Tang, is given the job of seducing him. Leung Chiu Wai is as convincing a pro-imperialist collaborator as any Irish politician though whether any of them have his predilection for brutal sex is something it’s best not to think about for too long.
Guess what? The young revolutionary quickly becomes infatuated with the psychopath. It happens every time! She even get him out of one or two tricky situations so illustrating that we are only the vessels of our passions.
It’s a lushly filmed and wonderfully acted piece but there are melting glaciers in Greenland with a snappier pace. As best I could work out the moral of the piece seems to be “don’t shag counter-revolutionary psychos”. It’s an important message that needs to passed on to young political activists but Lee could probably have transmitted it in rather under two and a half hours.
Liam redux 
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