ANG LEE’S Lust/Caution is a powerful meditation on the topic of obsession and sexual desire played out against the epic backdrop of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in World War II. The multilayered narrative of Lust/Caution offers a penetrating glimpse into the interplay between fantasy/performance and reality/truth. While the female protagonist Wang Chia-chih appears on the surface to be aiding the Chinese war effort in seducing the traitorous Mr. Yee, the intensity of their erotic bond causes her to lose hold of the original plan of the student conspirators, leading to an unexpected betrayal. The question, “Why did she do it?” is discussed at length in the introduction to the Lust/Caution screenplay by the film’s coscreenwriter James Schamus, who writes that “only behind the mask of the character Mai Tai-tai can Chia-chih truly desire”1—in other words, Wang Chia-chih can discover her true desire only through performance. Schamus also elaborates on Mr. Yee’s complicated psychology: “Yee doesn’t simply desire Mai Tai-tai while suspecting she is not who she says she is; it is precisely because he suspects her that he desires her”2—implying that Mr. Yee’s desire springs from mystery and intrigue, a transgression of trust. In other words, fear itself imbues the transgression with great value; the narrative of Lust/Caution bears out in great detail how the experience of fear gives value to the transgressive act. The actions of Mr. Yee and Wang Chia-chih display the uncontrollable force of their obsessive desire which leads them both into danger, and provides a commentary on the interplay between social restrictions and taboos and the inability to control obsession.
Lee’s Chinese historical drama Lust/Caution is the first film he chose to direct after winning the Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain in 2006, and his first Chinese film since directing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon seven years earlier. Having his status as world-class director secured by his Academy Award win, it is noteworthy that Lee would choose, for his next project, to return to a Chinese-themed film. Perhaps predictably, outside of Asia, worldwide critical response to Lee’s China-related topic was less than enthusiastic; the film’s NC-17 rating almost certainly reduced its accessibility, but despite the film’s early win of the Golden Lion, the top prize of the Venice International Film Festival, critical response to this World War II–era espionage film was only lukewarm.3 This may be because the film is a complicated and politically charged treatment of early twentieth-century Chinese history and culture. The film also presupposes a fairly advanced understanding of the conflicts and divided loyalties within China during World War II; notably, the film lacks any explanatory text in the opening frames that is a common feature of historical dramas.4 While being centered on a historically Chinese topic, the film also references the pervasive influence of globalization on traditional Chinese culture.
The film depicts a tale of espionage involving a young student, Wang Chia-chih (Tang Wei), who goes undercover to entrap a married man, known only as Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), who is collaborating with the Japanese in occupied Shanghai during the Second World War. In trying to snare the wealthy and powerful Mr. Yee, Wang Chia-chih takes on the identity of the married Mai Tai-tai, entering into a world of luxury and conspicuous consumption dominated by the powerful Mrs. Yee (Joan Chen). In the Yee family circle, Wang Chia-chih must adapt to playing the role of an elite and sophisticated woman who knows the finer points of wealth and status in upper-class Chinese society—ironically, this requires her to be fluent in English and familiar with the styles and tastes of the Western world. The Westernized elements incorporated into haute Chinese culture serve to both highlight the intense danger of Wang Chia-chih’s ruse and give her a sense of otherness or distance from her own identity. This globalized identity drives the movie deeper into psychological intricacies as Wang struggles to keep her mask from slipping when she begins to fall in love with Mr. Yee. The final events in the film take place on a ring-shopping trip in a jewelry store run by an Indian shop owner, when after Mr. Yee has presented Wang Chia-chih with a large diamond ring as a gift (symbolizing a commitment), Wang is unable to hide her emotions any longer and tips off Mr. Yee to the subterfuge, allowing him to escape.
In attempting to grasp the complexities of the character of Wang Chia-chih, her experience of obsessive desire in the film can be read in juxtaposition with Georges Bataille’s theories of taboo and transgression. Bataille posits that the pursuit of a forbidden action is increased by the presence of social taboos; while taboos help to create an orderly society, they also open up the possibility of transgression. Bataille sees the act of erotic fusion as similar to religious sacrifice, in which the subject seeks to be “loosed from its relatedness to the I”—in other words, the subject experiences a discontinuity with that which is subjective and rational. Bataille sees this as a way to reach a lost “continuity of Being,” a primordial force that could close the gap between the world of disciplined rationality and the outlawed “other of reason.” This may explain why Wang Chia-chih can find her true self only through performance: in the elite social circle she finds herself in, dominated by Mrs. Yee, everything around her is pretense, obfuscating the truth. However, through Wang Chia-chih’s performance of her role as Mai Tai-tai, submitting to transgressive sexual acts with a Japanese collaborator—only through this performance is she able to arrive at the truth. In exercising her sexual power and the force of her acting, she finds her true self. Ultimately, however, in trying to be two people at once, Wang Chia-chih’s duplicity causes her acute psychological strain, to the point where she loses hold of reality (or the certainty of which reality is “real” to her). Faced with the overwhelming inner contradiction between truth and performance, Wang Chia-chih must subvert one role, casting off her original selfhood, and leaping into the “other of reason” as Mai Tai-tai. This is one explanation for the startling decision that she ultimately makes in the film and story.
Bataille—Eroticism and the Allure of Transgression
The relationship between Wang Chia-chih and Mr. Yee in Lust/Caution neatly expresses this interplay between taboo and transgression; reading Lust/Caution through Bataille’s theories on taboo and transgression helps to articulate this symbiotic relationship. Bataille described transgression in terms of Cold War history and grounded his theories in historical concerns in a way quite applicable to the wartime political psychology of the Japanese occupation. The complex international politics of the Cold War between the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the vast espionage network of Russia shares similarities with Chinese and Japanese political history, in that the transgressive individual became equated with the enemy. This enemy status of the transgressor created intense intrigue as well as highly-charged emotion due to its threat to the national security of the beleaguered nation. In addition, in Bataille’s works, transgression is a desire created by the taboo itself: “the object of the prohibition was first marked out for coveting by the prohibition itself: If the prohibition was essentially of a sexual nature it must have drawn attention to the sexual value of the object (or rather, its erotic value).”5
Bataille’s statement elucidates how the prohibition itself gives value to the transgressive behavior. For Bataille, it is fear itself that imbues the transgression with great value: “The forbidden action takes on a significance it lacks before fear widens the gap between us and it and invests it with an aura of excitement.”6 The idea of fear giving value to the transgressive act is demonstrated clearly by the relationship between Wang Chia-chih and Mr. Yee; Lust/Caution demonstrates how erotic excitement can be generated by fear. In addition, Bataille’s notion of the sacred and the profane also complements his ideas on taboo and transgression. In Bataille’s description, the profane world is constituted by work and reason, the world of taboos. However, in the sacred world, according to the author, the human seeks a lost unity, a continuity found only in death. Bataille theorizes that this totality that one finds in the sacred, which is unachievable and remains out of reach, can be sought “only at the price of great sacrifice.”7 Thus, Wang Chia-chih gives her life as a sacrifice for this lost unity that must by its very definition remain out of reach.
For Bataille: “The final aim of eroticism is fusion, all barriers gone.”8 The transgressive value of eroticism helps to displace the experience of subjectivity and achieve unity with the sacred world. This unity with the sacred, as in religious sacrifice, would result in the obliteration of the personality, an obliteration connected with death. Bataille reiterates: “If the union of two lovers comes about through love, it involves the idea of death. … This aura of death is what denotes passion.”9 Bataille further explores eroticism’s connection to expenditure/sacrifice, indicating that the drive toward transgressive eroticism requires a great expenditure of energy as well as a risk of death. He writes: “Erotic activity can be disgusting: it can also be noble, ethereal, excluding sexual content, but it illustrates a principle of human behavior in the clearest way: what we want is what uses up our strength and our resources, and, if necessary, places our lives in danger.”10
In connection with Batille’s theory on transgression, one of the taboos dealt with in Lust/Caution is premarital sexuality/loss of virginity: for the sexually conservative China of the 1930s–1940s, the activity of premarital sex being prohibited and taboo thus imbues it with an aura of excitement, danger, and fear. Premarital sex is considered wrong; consequently, only one of the student conspirators is not a virgin. This lack of sexual experience leads to the awkward scene in the film in which Wang Chia-chih must be taught to perform sexually by Liang Jun-sheng (Ko Yu-luen), whose only sexual experiences have come from visiting prostitutes. Wang offers up her body—her virginity—as a “sacrifice” to the cause. However, the virginity of the young male and female students causes them to treat Wang Chia-chih differently after she has shared her body with Liang Jun-sheng; they distance themselves from her and no one dares to speak with her. Wang Chia-chih is tainted because of her taboo behavior; she has lost her virginity, her innocence, and the wholeness of her identity.
Even more significant is the connection between the taboo of the illicit sexual relationship combined with the espionage effort. Wang states how she will finish the sexual act and end up with Yee’s “blood and brains” covering her. This can be juxtaposed with Bataille’s notion of love as “sacrifice,” a quasi-spiritual notion. Does Wang feel that she will be redeemed by Yee’s death and her act of patriotism? The image of his blood covering her body seems to evoke a religious sacrifice—this can be juxtaposed with the idea of her being “cleansed” by being with Mr. Yee in a way that evokes Bataille’s notion of sacrifice and death. She says to the cell group leader Old Wu (Tou Chung-hua):
That’s why I torture him until he can’t take it any longer, and I will keep going until I can’t go anymore. … Every time when he finally collapses on me, I think, maybe this is it, maybe this is the moment you’ll come, and shoot him, right in the back of the head, and his blood and brains will cover me.11
Also evoking Bataille’s notion of eroticism and death, in the screenplay both the character of Mr. Yee and the character of Wang Chia-chih share the implication that they are already dead. Mr. Yee knows he is already a dead man, living the monstrous, alienated existence of the betrayer who can trust no one. When the war ends, Mr. Yee has no future—he cannot be accepted by the Japanese (with whom he is siding) nor by the Chinese (who will punish him for his betrayal). He is already a non-person, with no country and no lasting allegiance. Likewise, Wang Chia-chih is dead. This is alluded to when Wang Chia-chih’s life is given little value by the group leader, Old Wu, who burns her final letter to her father to destroy proof of her existence. This action demonstrates that Old Wu expects Wang Chia-chih to die, and his burning of her letter seems to already signify this coming extinguishment—in his eyes, she is already dead. He also speaks offhandedly of two female spies who died in the mission before her—in the business of war, Old Wu views the female spies as a necessary sacrifice to the cause.
When she first takes on the spy mission, Wang Chia-chih naively believes she can emotionally bear the strain of living a double life. However, as the playacting becomes more serious, she sacrifices more and more of her personhood, her selfhood. This becomes apparent as Wang Chia-chih begins to adapt the mannerisms and tastes of Mai Tai-tai—for example, choosing to have a cigarette after a long day, and no longer enjoying the carefree identity of a young student, as her friends still do in the scene where they try out the latest fashionable dance steps. As she becomes more and more comfortable in the “dress-up” clothing of Mai Tai-tai, Wang Chia-chih is slowly subsumed by the character she is playing, becoming more mature, graceful, and elegant in her bearing. The “death” of Wang the student innocent is revealed most clearly after her young friends commit murder and she runs off into the night, disappearing into blackness, without uttering a single word to anyone. When next she appears onscreen, her face is pale, drained of life and emotion: she is a living cadaver.
Throughout the story, Chang’s fiction reflects Bataille’s connection between love and sacrifice, between sex and death. There are textual references to this idea of sacrifice: “she had already determined to make a sacrifice of herself,”12 and “In truth, every time she was with Yee she felt cleansed, as if by a scalding hot bath …”13 In addition, the idea of taboo and transgression is reflected in Chang’s writing by the reaction of Wang Chia-chih’s friends as the scheme collapses and the Yee family returns to Shanghai. She feels alienated from her former group of friends, no longer accepted by the orthodoxy, the status quo: “All the time she was with them, she felt they were eyeing her curiously—as if she were some kind of freak, or grotesque.”14
Even more markedly, it is Ang Lee’s unflinchingly graphic sex scenes between Wang Chia-chih and Mr. Yee that bear out Bataille’s notion of erotic fusion and the connection between eroticism and death. Although these controversial scenes earned the film an NC-17 rating and thus made it less commercially marketable, and although Eileen Chang’s original short story made only oblique references to the sexual intercourse between the two characters, Lee and producer James Schamus continued to defend the scenes as pivotal to explain the complexity of the relationship between Mr. Yee and Wang Chia-chih (Lee has stated that he made the sexual choreography up in his own head, choreographed as carefully as he did the fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Altogether there are three sex scenes in Lust/Caution, amounting to approximately ten minutes in total, which occur comparatively late in the film’s 157-minute running time. In each scene, the explicit sex metaphorically represents a different stage in the relationship between Mr. Yee and Wang Chia-chih, a growing intimacy between the two characters demonstrating Mr. Yee’s gradual acceptance of Wang and the tenuous bond of “trust” between them.
The first sex scene reveals the sadomasochism and violence of Mr. Yee which are crucial in illustrating his character: it is one of dominance and, strangely, vulnerability due to the bitter times that he lives in. He has to create pain in her in order to “feel alive”—and Wang Chia-chih intuitively understands this. His lack of trust, due to the harsh reality of his traitorous political identity as a Japanese collaborator, leads him to suppress his emotions and to place his trust in no one. Thus, in the first sex scene, Mr. Yee expresses his distrust by keeping Wang’s face turned away from him, not allowing her to face him. The sex in the first scene is like a rape, violent and carnal; he tears her clothes and treats her brutally, as a pimp would treat a prostitute. Yet the end of the scene show’s Wang’s eroticization of this dominance as she smiles to herself nearly imperceptibly, feeling herself drawn to the man who just used her. In the second sex scene, the tables have begun to turn: with Wang Chia-chih’s threat to leave, Mr. Yee is in a weaker position. His change of attitude is reflected by more revealing of his physical body, as if he has begun to let his guard down. At the same time, Wang is able to use her sexuality to powerfully attract him and gain more control over him. Wang’s growing confidence is apparent in this scene; nevertheless there is still an underlying tension.
Finally, the third scene is the most crucial in revealing the changing nature of their relationship: in this scene, the suspicion of both characters is revealed. With the close proximity of Mr. Yee’s gun near the bed, Wang has an opportunity to shoot Mr. Yee. However, even with the conditions ideal for her mission, she chooses not to shoot him, but instead continues with their lovemaking. At that moment, she has finally gained Mr. Yee’s total trust. His vulnerability to her is subsequently revealed when he allows her to cover his eyes with a pillow although he had previously confessed to a fear of the dark. In addition, in this third scene, there is a palpable tenderness completely unlike the violence of the previous two scenes. Finally, Mr. Yee is no longer dominant; instead it is Wang who remains on top throughout most of the scene, a visual metaphor for her taking the lead and gaining the advantage in their relationship. This scene is anchored most fully in emotion, exposing the deep bond between the characters, and demonstrating that the boundaries between “occupier” and “occupied” have become blurred.
While these three scenes have been a focus of much debate and have been criticized for being borderline pornographic, the inclusion of such explicit sex scenes in the film was a decision made to bring more clarity to the narrative—telling the story and revealing the characters’ inner psychology through the display of their physical actions. Because the word “lust” is used in the film’s title,15 it is unsurprising that Lee as a director felt that the graphic display of lust was necessary for the film, and although these scenes may be difficult for some viewers to watch, they viscerally express the urgency and violence that necessarily accompany the notion of lust.
Eileen Chang and the Original Story of “Lust, Caution”
“Lust, Caution” is a relatively short piece among Chang’s works, and it is considered unusual in her oeuvre due to its controversial subject matter and unconventional narrative technique. Chang ostensibly based her narrative on the true story of Zheng Pingru (1918–1940), a 22-year-old female spy who failed in the assassination attempt of Wang Jingwei’s security chief, Ding Mocun (1903–1947) and was later executed. Chang was apparently captivated by this subject matter and started writing the story while living in Hong Kong in the 1950s; a surviving manuscript from the period shows that the story was originally written in English and entitled “The Spyring.” However, Chang obsessively revised the story for a period of more than twenty years before it was finally published in Taiwan in 1977 in Chinese as “Se, Jie” (“Lust, Caution”). The famed author’s obsession with the story is noteworthy because the emotions in the story seem to be at least partly autobiographical. For example, both Chang and her protagonist Wang Chia-chih were students in Hong Kong when the city fell to the Japanese in 1942, both made their way to Shanghai, and, most notoriously, both fell in love with pro-Japanese collaborators—members of the Wang Jingwei government controlled by the Japanese. Eileen Chang’s first husband was Hu Lancheng, who was still married to his third wife when they met in 1943. In 1945, a year after the two were married, the Japanese surrendered and Hu was forced to go into hiding in a nearby city. Throughout this tense period, Chang remained loyal to Hu and supported him financially, but she later discovered his continuing infidelities and the two parted bitterly. She finally divorced him in 1947.
Chang’s writing is known for its psychological intricacy. The short story is written in the third person, with lengthy sections of dialogue. However, with the complexity of William Faulkner, to whom Chang is sometimes compared, the narrator will at times suddenly voice the inner thoughts of the characters, often without first identifying to which character the thoughts belong, through a style that mixes interior monologues with third-person narration that is a triumph of fictive modernism. Chang also masterfully transitions from general explanations of plot and vague, slightly disorienting flashbacks, to vivid dialogues and meticulously-recorded details from Wang Chia-chih’s present-day experiences. (Similarly, the film has a highly complex timeline of flashbacks, which make it seem like many years have passed—and yet the main events of the film all happen over the course of a single afternoon.) The sensitivity and technical skill with which Chang re-creates the variance of human temporal memory—distant memories are more hazy, while recent ones are vivid with adjectival detail—can be understood as a commentary upon the unreliability of human memory and the subjectivity of historical judgment. Another distinctive aspect of Chang’s style is her ability to contrast the banality and minutiae of the upper-class bourgeois world with the calculated brutality of wartime Shanghai. The triviality of the conversation among the wealthy tai-tais, whose long exchanges serve as bookends opening and closing the narrative, is contrasted with the life-and-death undercurrents of the main story.
The psychological complexity of “Lust, Caution” also includes a father/daughter conflict, in that Wang Chia-chih’s father’s abandonment of her is also a driving force behind her warped search for love. This emphasis on the father/daughter conflict is given a very detailed backstory in the film, much more so than in Chang’s original story; this is in keeping with Lee’s particular fascination with the generation gap, and the relationship between parent and child, a frequent topic explored in his films, especially in Pushing Hands and Eat Drink Man Woman. In Lust/Caution, screenwriters Wang Huiling and James Schamus have fleshed out details regarding Wang’s father’s divorce, his remarriage in England, and his refusal to send for his daughter to join him in his new family. Thus, in Lee’s film, Wang Chia-chih is completely rejected by her father in ways that shatter her and complicate her identity; this is not unlike the struggles of Bruce Banner and Ennis Del Mar as two further examples of negative paternal influence. Similarly, this reflects Eileen Chang’s own background, coming as she did from an unhappy childhood in a wealthy but highly dysfunctional family in which her much-absent father sided with her stepmother against her and, in a well-known incident from her teen years, locked her up and savagely beat her. Chang’s own marriages, first to Hu Lancheng, when she was 24 and he was 37, and later to Ferdinand Reyer, an American screenwriter thirty years her senior, suggest a hunger for paternal love that is reflected in the relationship between Wang Chia-chih and Mr. Yee.
Chinese High Society, Western Cultural Influences, and Performance/Truth
The short story “Lust, Caution” begins at the mahjong table, with a description of the hot lamps blazing down on the white table-cloth and the clicking of tiles. The opening lines of Chang’s story draw attention to these details:
Though it was still daylight, the hot lamp was shining full-beam over the mahjong table. Diamond rings flashed under its glare as their wearers clacked and reshuffled their tiles.16
Lee begins the film with this same image: the film opens with complicated and multiangled filming of a scene of mahjong, technically very exacting and involving, using four cameras. Through this scene, the viewer is plunged into a world with signifiers of high-society China, manners, taste, and wealth, with ladies making small talk around a mahjong table—nothing is spelled out clearly. The clothing of the participants sitting around the mahjong table is highlighted in Chang’s description—this echoes Chang’s characteristic emphasis on ornament and high-society elegance, the fashions dominant in Shanghai in the 1940’s “Golden Age.” Chang also focuses her attention on the detailed and ornate patterns in tasteful, upper-class furnishings. These period details add a great authenticity to Chang’s descriptions as well as providing a rich collection of visual details for Lee to accentuate in the film. At the same time, these signifiers highlight the artifice of high-society Shanghai because they are props in an elite social drama.
The mahjong itself is only one of the “games” being played: the mahjong scene sets the tone as an artifice, as the tai-tais at the mahjong table are competing, not only at the game of tiles on the table, but in their dress and jewelry, financial background, and social status. They each want to show off their wealth and status to prove that they are in a superior position to anyone else at the table. This opening scene reveals the entire plot of Eileen Chang’s narrative in a microcosm—everyone at the table has secrets, and no one can trust anyone else in the room. Their relationships are based on intricate connections of business and social obligation, so they cannot speak of real feelings. Instead, they must communicate in a sort of double-talk, jockeying for position though light-hearted chatter that uses cloaked humor to hide more nefarious purposes. They discuss whose turn it is to treat the group to dinner, in which restaurant they plan to dine, and the prices of high-society articles in the inflationary economy of Shanghai. The scene encapsulates Wang Chia-chih’s alienation from the high-class, fashionable world she has entered. For example, Wang Chiah-chih is ashamed of her simple ring, which does not compare to the glittering display of wealth on the fingers of the other players in the mahjong game: “She should have left her jadeite ring back in its box, she realized; to spare herself all those sneering glances.”17 The important elements of the scene, such as the outfits and accessories worn by the wealthy tai-tais, point out their social class, and Wang Chia-chih’s lack of a diamond ring makes her stand out as an outsider, unable to fully assimilate.
This upper-class world of posturing and deceit is skillfully evoked by Eileen Chang’s fictive description in this first scene. Chang’s writing is known for its focus on the clothing, accoutrements, the furnishings and curtains, the ornaments and decorations, the lighting and the subtle sensitivity to detail which her highly-attuned sense of fashion and taste could give her, as a member of the wealthy class in Shanghai of the period. She adds minute details through short sentences, and tends to use words to describe sizes, shapes, colors, and patterns—the throwaway details that only someone of her wealthy background and privileged social class could have observed so keenly. At the same time, careful dissection of these visual metaphors shows that Chang ironizes their vulgarity with abject disdain. She talks about the women’s clothing as if they were wearing uniforms, or costumes. A great deal of care is taken in describing the outfit worn by Wang Chia-chih with its “shallow, rounded collar standing only half an inch tall, in the Western style.”18 Chang also records “her makeup was understated, except for the glossily rouged arcs of her lips.”19 Special focus is also given to the drapes, which were cut in broad swaths to match the intricate pattern, which, Chang notes deliberately, allowed for “extra wastage,” exhibiting the ostentatious display of wealth in the Yee household:
The wall behind him was swathed in heavy yellowish-brown wool curtains printed with a brick-red phoenix-tail fern design, each blade almost six feet long. … False french windows, and enormous drapes to cover them, were all the rage just then. Because of the war, fabrics were in short supply; floor-length curtains such as those hanging behind Mr. Yee—using up an entire bolt of cloth, with extra wastage from pattern matching—were a conspicuous extravagance.20
The passage further notes that the Yee family had this particular pattern for their curtains because a prominent official in the Wang Jingwei government had a pair—thus the Yees were obligated to follow suit in extravagant decorating. This “wastage” during wartime was a luxury unimaginable to more than the select few who enjoyed this privileged status.
In the film, Lee puts particular emphasis on the dichotomy and disconnection that Wang Chia-chih feels as she takes on the identity of the married Mai Tai-tai, entering into a cosmopolitan world of luxury and conspicuous consumption that is outside of her usual character and experience. In the elite cosmopolitan atmosphere of 1940s Shanghai, the connotation of status involves a complex interplay between the traditional and the modern, as well as the Chinese and Western. The six languages used in the film—Mandarin, Japanese, English, Hindi, Shanghainese, and Cantonese—are an early twentieth-century example of the effect of globalization. The high-end jewelry shopkeeper and the manager of the jewelry shop are Indian and communicate with each other in Hindi, but the language of luxury in Shanghai is English—when Wang Chia-chih first enters the shop, she conducts all of her business in English. Later, when Wang Chia-chih finally receives the ring from the Indian shopkeeper, the Indian man breaks into the Chinese conversation between Wang and her lover, using English to say “Congratulations, Miss!” This English phrase—congratulations on an engagement—adds an unexpected emotional element to the scene. English is also the language used at the Keissling Café in Shanghai where Wang Chia-chih sets the trap for Mr. Yee; she uses English to address the waiter and to ask to use the phone in the restaurant. These multilingual abilities are a common trope in espionage films—a world-class spy must be fluent in several languages—moreover, the seamless shift among languages highlights Wang Chia-chih’s sophistication. Many of the major street names and shop names are in English; for example, as Wang Chia-chih flees from the assassination scene, she gives the address “Ferguson Road” to the pedicab driver. This use of English gives the scenes of post-Qing Shanghai and the stylistic elegance of colonial Hong Kong an extra air of pedigree and intrigue.
Western styles of clothing, which were in vogue in Shanghai during the period, also play a significant role in the film. Western materials, especially English wool, are in demand, and men like Mr. Yee wear custom-tailored Western suits. But by far the most significant statement is made through the clothing of Wang Chia-chih. In earlier scenes in Hong Kong where Wang attends class as a student, she wears a simple, unadorned blue qipao worn by all the female students, and dressed like this, with no makeup, she appears young and innocent. However, later, in the scenes at the Keissling Café, waiting to entrap Mr. Yee, she wears the garb of a classic spy with her trench coat, red-rouged lips, and a black hat tipped down over her eyes. This clothing is an archetypal signifier for a classic Western spy—while telling a shorthand version of the espionage story and helping propel the narrative forward, the Western clothing demonstrates in strong visual terms that Wang Chia-chih is far removed from her original character.
Moreover, Lee takes care to demonstrate how Wang Chia-chih was significantly influenced by Western film culture, especially film noir, through references to five different Western films. First, she is shown on two separate occasions watching Western films in a movie theater; these are Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939), and Penny Serenade (1941). Intermezzo is the story of a love affair between a married man (Leslie Howard) and his young daughter’s piano teacher (Ingrid Bergman)—the victimized seven-year-old daughter is caught between the heartbreak of the betrayed mother and her own devotion to the adulterous father. Wang Chia-chih’s face is covered with tears as she watches the film. This reaction reveals Wang’s own loneliness due to the abandonment by her own father, who left China for England, remarried, and began a new life in a new country, abandoning his daughter. It is notable that this Western film is a catalyst for unlocking Wang Chia-chih’s deeply buried emotions concerning betrayal. In addition, posters for specific films are seen outside of the cinema: The Thief of Bagdad (1940), which Wang Chia-chih contemplates briefly, Destry Rides Again (1939), and Suspicion (1941), a poster seen inside a cinema Wang visits. Suspicion, in which a shy young Englishwoman (Joan Fontaine) begins to suspect her new husband (Cary Grant) of trying to kill her, is replete with the film noir characteristics of shadowy darkness and claustrophobic intensity which echo the elemental composition of Lust/Caution itself.
In war-torn Shanghai, Wang Chia-chih (right) gazes at a movie poster of Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) as she contemplates her own choice to seduce and murder the traitorous Mr. Yee.
Before Wang Chia-chih falls in love with Mr. Yee, she first falls in love with performance, as a young leading actress in a Hong Kong student theatrical troupe. Early in the film, the viewer sees Wang Chia-chih after her own first performance onstage—she is breathless, exuberant, and the euphoria carries her late into the rainy night; she can’t sleep for all the excitement she feels. This theatrical bearing is what first attracts Wang to performance: she enjoys the power she feels over her audience. A day later she is drawn back to the stage on which she had performed so successfully, and she wanders, musing among the false trees of the fictional scene until Kuang Yumin (Wang Leehom) and his friends call her from the audience seats in the balcony to join their meeting. Metaphorically, they are calling her “back to reality,” where they request her aid in an actual assassination. Kuang’s lines in the film underscore the dichotomy between reality and performance when he says that it is more valuable to kill a real flesh-and-blood traitor than to wrench tears from an audience. She agrees to join the plot, naïvely and innocently, intrigued by the challenge of her new performance.
While her passion for performance is what seems to drive Wang Chia-chih, her own emotion plays a significant role. This is metaphorically suggested by the cyanide pill that Wang is instructed to take if she is ever caught. The pill appears twice in the film: the first time, when Wang defines herself as Mr. Yee’s false lover (as performer, when she agrees to be a spy and is given the pill by her group leader), and the second time, just after she defines herself as Mr. Yee’s real lover (after she admits to herself that she truly loves him). After the conspiracy plot is compromised, Wang Chia-chih does not take the pill as she was instructed. This refusal to commit suicide in service to her country is the metaphorical conclusion of the story: Wang becomes her true self only when she gives up playing the role of agent. She stops performing and allows herself to be true to her actual emotion. As if to confirm this, immediately following there is a flashback to the scene in Hong Kong University where Kuang Yumin first calls her off the stage. It is as if she is bidding goodbye to performance a second time, this time from the other side of the stage, from her performance of her role as agent, and back to the freedom of her own real self.
At the end of the film, after Wang Chia-chih reveals her true feelings to Mr. Yee, she is left spent and empty, and stumbles out of the jewelry store in a daze. From there, she wanders along the sidewalk, pausing briefly to gaze at the display window of an expensive department store. The mannequins in the windows are all dressed in high-society blouses, wraps, and gowns, resembling the styles of fashion icons from European haute couture. The scene underscores Wang’s helplessness and loneliness, as the accoutrements of high fashion can no longer help her or offer any meaning to her life. The expressionless, phantom-like mannequins underscore the emptiness and falseness of Wang Chia-chih’s position—she has been stripped of her high-class identity, and her life will soon be extinguished; however, the false status of Western fashion, with which she had carefully constructed her identity, now offers her no help or refuge.
Intriguingly, Lee has said that the actor he identified most with at the shoot was not Tony Leung as Mr. Yee (male), but Tang Wei as Wang Chia-chih (female). Asked how he selected Tang Wei to play the role, he described this unexpected symbiosis:
She’s very close in disposition to how Wang Chia-chih is described in the story—she’s like one of my parents’ generation, which is pretty rare these days. She didn’t seem strikingly beautiful but she did the best reading and there was something about her. Most of all, she’s like the female version of me—I identify with her so closely that, by pretending, I found my true self. So the theme of the story has a personal identification for me.21
In an article by Moira Macdonald entitled “Ang Lee and the Power of Performance,” Lee also speaks about the inspiration he drew from the character of Wang Chia-chih, and how it became a motive for making Lust/Caution. In the article, Lee referred to the scene early in the film where Wang Chia-chih is euphoric after her first stage performance, in high spirits and breathless on a rainy night. In the interview, Lee recalled his own first performance at the Taiwan Academy of Arts, his personal account of a rainy night when he experienced the transcendence of acting on stage, of moving the audience, and how his life was changed unexpectedly and permanently by performance. He linked his own experience with that of Wang Chia-chih, saying:
I’m like that girl [Wang Chia-chih], basically. She’s awakening. She feels the power. There’s something funny about acting—you become empowered … [I was] a repressed kid, never allowed to touch art, only academic work. I flunked the college examinations, and I went to art school to prepare for the next year. By chance, I was on stage. I realized the rest of my life. So, when I read that in the short story, I decided to do it.22
Lee draws a connection between himself and Wang Chia-chih, revealing that his motivation for doing the film had to do with Wang Chia-chih’s moment of transformation as she fell in love with the power of performance. Lee emphasizes the awakening power of performance, and how though pretending, one may discover the truth. This is similar to Bataille’s notion of seeking the primordial “continuity of Being” through the transgressive power of the breaking of taboos and the surrender of one’s own subjectivity. Lee’s films have often contained autobiographical elements—for example, the treatment of the loneliness and alienation in Pushing Hands or the father/son conflict in The Wedding Banquet. Similarly, there is an element of autobiography in the narrative of Lust/Caution regarding the power of performance for discovering truth. The encoded message is that Lee is still discovering truth through storytelling, drama, and filmmaking.
The question “Why did she do it?” is still unanswered at the end of both the film and story. Wang Chia-chih’s character is trapped between performance and reality, between her commitment to her cause and her unexpected love for her victim. Cowriter James Schamus compares the unveiling of Wang Chia-chih’s character to a game of mirrors: “Wang Chia-chih … is a woman caught up in a game of cinematic and literary mirrors, a game that has now ensnared Ang Lee as he reflects his own cinematic mirror onto [Eileen Chang’s] remarkable work.”23 The confusion is caused by an actress playing a role within a film of an actress playing a role—a labyrinthine puzzle that Lee willingly takes on in Lust/Caution. In the process, Lee unearths complex emotions toward identity and truth, as revealed in only the most intimate moments between illicit lovers in times of extreme duress.