In lesser hands, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution would merely be Hitchcock on Viagra.
The incendiary components are all here: The tormented femme fatale, the lethal but alluring man she must seduce, the exotic locales, the political intrigue -- all punctuated by startling sex between lust-struck hunter and prey.
Yet Lee, working from Eileen Chang's short story, digs deeper than that, crafting a spellbinder of desire, hurt and nerve-rattling betrayal.
No surprise there. The Taiwanese Oscar-winner has always tempered his own artistic predilections for tragedy and emotionally-unavailable characters with bursts of very accessible, but never gratuitous, sex and violence.
In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he embellished his soulful epic with clashes of gravity-defying martial arts. In Brokeback Mountain, he utilized the vast, lonely landscapes on-screen to illustrate the distances -- both physical and psychological -- between his love-sick cowboys. Even in his failed Hulk, he seemed as attuned to the Marvel monster's buried, besieged humanity as to his gamma-powered rages.
So while much of Lust, Caution's pre-release buzz has been about its bedroom manoeuvres -- only about as graphic as pay cable, it turns out -- the film is, in fact, lean on thrills, but rich in substance.
Newcomer Tang Wei -- in a star-making performance -- portrays Wong Chia-Chi, a drama student in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II enlisted by the resistance to ensnare a married government minister, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung).
The two -- who meet for intense, even sadomasochistic, sexual encounters -- spar and make love as extensions of the identities they have created for themselves: The brutal interrogator and the chilly conniver.
Yet both are seduced -- and undone -- by their own yearning to reveal all.
Throughout, Lee's storytelling is deliberate -- perhaps too remote, even sluggish, for some.
Yet for those who allow it, with its lush beauty and haunting narrative, to envelop them, Lust, Caution resonates to the bone.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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