Currently Watching Lust Caution (Se Jie) By Johnson Yuen, Chih-ying Chu, Lee-Hom Wang, Anupam Kher, Tony Leung Chiu Wai see related

Bad buzz is starting to circle Ang Lee’s new film Lust, Caution (****), which is a shame, because it is a flawed movie but still a pretty goddamned good one, difficult and slowly paced and too damn long but fascinating all the same. The buzz going around (particularly in the less enlightened New York papers) is that it’s long and slow and (here’s the killer) boring—the buzzword which, in today’s movie-going climate, can most effectively kill a picture (people will see a movie that they hear is stupid—witness the killer box office for Transformers—before they’ll see one that they hear is boring). The “long and boring” buzz is also circling the brilliant Assassination of Jesse James, which deserves the label even less than this film does.

The film has also gained some notoriety for its graphic sex scenes, which earned it an NC-17 rating that Focus Features has admirably stuck with. Indeed, if there were ever a solid argument for that rating’s existence (why it should be there, and why it should be practical for Hollywood’s use—which it unfortunately isn’t), it would be this film, which in its best moments recalls Last Tango In Paris—insofar as the sexuality is neither gratuitous nor intended (solely, anyway) for titillation, but is a vital component in understanding its leading characters and their relationship with each other. Things are said in their sex scenes that can’t be stated in dialogue; they enrich the story, instead of taking us outside of it.

Performances are strong across the board, from the always-reliable Tony Leung and Joan Chen to an astonishing newcomer named Wei Tang, whose work as the film’s heroine is legitimately Oscar-worthy. So is the gorgeous cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto (Alejandro González Iñárritu's regular DP, who also shot 25^th Hour and Lee’s previous film, Brokeback Mountain). But the screenplay by Hui-Ling Wang and Lee’s frequent collaborator James Schamus takes entirely too long to get going (its first act is noticeably flabby), and Lee occasionally lets the pace slack a bit too much. Which is not to say Lust, Caution isn’t worthwhile; Lee’s made plenty of masterpieces (Brokeback, Crouching Tiger, The Ice Storm), so I think we can let him get by, once in a while, with one that’s merely very good.