Film

The title Lust, Caution promises an emotional conflict, but Lee’s follow-up to Brokeback Mountain swings violently between the two modes, offering more than an hour of restrained espionage drama—hushed phone calls, secret assassination plans, several rounds of mah-jongg—before plunging headlong into its Verhoeven-caliber sex scenes. Regarding those: Courting disproportionate hype, Lee has stressed the importance of the sex for character development, which makes sense…if, as here, your characters are woefully underdeveloped.

The film’s central tension isn’t lust versus caution, but the disconnect between Lee’s impeccable polish and an unfocused screenplay, expanded by Wang Hui-ling and James Schamus from a short story by Eileen Chang. It doesn’t help that the plot invites constant comparison with Black Book: During the second Sino-Japanese war, a university student named Wong Chia Chi (terrific newcomer Tang) is inspired by a classmate to join the resistance; a failed attempt to assassinate a steely puppet-government official (Leung) puts Chia Chi in an ideal position to seduce him.

For a spy, our heroine evinces little interest in her target’s work—or even in her own movement. Lust, Caution takes a curiously myopic view of war, preferring to operate on an interpersonal battlefield. With his character explicitly likened to Cary Grant, Leung isn’t terribly convincing when binding Tang with a belt, but both actors nearly throw their backs out—literally—attempting to put some flesh on the movie’s dramaturgical bones. Notwithstanding the leads’ efforts (and heartstopping final scene together), a simple rewrite would have sufficed.