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Ang Lee kept his pants, but nearly lost his mind.
The problem? The graphic sex scenes at the heart of his latest drama Lust, Caution.
"This is way out there," the Oscar-winning director says of the sequences featuring actors Tony Leung and Tang Wei.
"It drove me insane. They almost stopped the production to send me to a hospital."
And indeed the sex in his sad, sultry period piece is remarkable as Leung and Wei play naked Jenga with each other's parts and ports of entry. No wonder Lust, Caution made headlines when the U.S. ratings board shackled it with the dreaded NC-17, placing it in the same esteemed company as Showgirls. Yet, hoopla aside, the reality is all the fornicating is rather contained -- two noteworthy sequences, each lasting five minutes or so -- and embedded deep into both the running time of the film and the psychology of its characters. (At a Toronto International Film Festival screening, a blood-soaked murder in the film elicited a far more visceral response from a woman seated beside me -- complete with gasps and eye-covering -- than all the simulated copulating did.)
A superb Wei stars as a young woman enlisted by the Chinese resistance in Japanese-occupied 1942 Shanghai to spy on (and aid in the assassination of) her high-ranking lover (Leung).
It's not for the ADD-afflicted, but those who let it envelop them will find the sorrowful story -- thick with themes of identity, self-discovery and self-denial -- pays off enormous dividends.
Lust, Caution serves as tomorrow's closing gala premiere of this year's Calgary International Film Festival before it opens in October.
Lee spoke to Sun Media in Toronto, where the movie had its North American premiere.
Although he won't be attending tomorrow's Calgary gala, Lee expressed fond memories of the city, where his last film, Brokeback Mountain, was filmed. In fact, the director, who was frequently photographed wearing a Flames ball cap, says he still carries the hat with him wherever he goes. Would he ever return to Calgary to shoot another movie? Maybe, Lee says, musing it would be the ideal location if he ever decides to make a film about his newfound favourite sport -- hockey. For the time though, he's content to merely recover from Lust, Caution. As with Brokeback -- which transcended the snicker-worthy notion of gay cowboys to emerge an acclaimed tragedy -- Lust, Caution again circles lost souls who are incapable of reconciling their actions with their desires.
Lee laughs about it now, but at the time was conflicted between the "deep responsibility" he felt towards his understandably vulnerable actors -- and the need to service the storytelling.
"It's the ultimate acting. She has to earn her interrogator's trust to survive. (She's the) good girl playing a bad girl."