Lust, Caution

I saw Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution twice this week – it’s a film so overflowing with subtle nuances that after the first viewing I was at a loss – I really had no idea what I thought of it. On the second viewing I had a realisation: for me, what makes Ang Lee an interesting director is his use of close-ups, and his careful construction of intimate details. Lee shoots terrific close ups – ones which allow the characters to come to life through their gestures, the details of their clothing and jewellery, and the subtle changes in their facial expressions.

Toward the start of the film, after the successful opening night of their patriotic theatre performance, Wong (Wei Tang) and her friends get on a bus, and after drawing her first cigarette, Wong moves to a seat alone and leans out of the window. Here, the film shifts into slow motion, the soft rain drops gently onto Wong’s hand as she reaches out into the night, her tongue licking the corner of her mouth in a sensual gesture she later repeats in moments of passion. It is a romantic and somewhat clichéd image (young, unspoiled girl on the precipice of becoming a less young and slightly spoiled woman), but despite this, the shot’s detail perfectly captures Wong’s spirit and self possession, and the sense that she is somehow apart from the rest of the group. The tiny gestures, like Wong’s tongue, the lipstick she leaves on the crockery, her slow, striding walk, and her constantly shifting facial expressions, are what this film left with me.

This discovery of Lee’s close ups delights me, because it explains why I have sometimes found myself with ambivalent feelings toward Lee’s visual style. My favourite films tend to be the ones that use a lot of wide shots and long takes from fixed camera positions – two recent exponents of this style are Tsai Ming Liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan – films where the characters inner life is projected onto the landscapes that, often quite literally, overwhelm them. Lee however, is an intimate filmmaker – even his wide and long shots feel close. The characters are larger than their surroundings, their internal world reflected in their actions rather than displaced onto the visual landscape. This is not to say that Lust, Caution is not a visually striking film – the visuality is just concentrated into the details and their relationships to one another, rather than into the presentation of images with a classical, painterly sense of composition.

This focus on the small allows Lee to work at making the characters unique. All the official’s wives who play mah-jong with Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen) have differences as well as similarities, where in other films their characters might easily be merged into a type. The way each one places her mah-jong tiles, their speech, the differences in their jewellery and clothes are emphasised through the swiftly moving close ups that dominate the mah-jong sequences. Similarly, even as the friends attempt to unite in a common cause, their reasons for being part of Kuang’s (Lee-Hom Wang) mission are clearly all different.

This brings me to the incredible depth of Wong’s character. The multitude of possibilities as to why she joins Kuang and to the motivations behind each of her actions mean that like any real person, she refuses to be pinned down to any specific, conclusive desire, but is instead the fascinating result of a series of conflicting needs and wants.