CULTURE-CHINA: Lust, Caution – Politically Incorrect Box Office Grosser

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Nov 26 2007 (IPS) - At bookstores and university hallways, intellectuals here have been engaging in nothing less than ideological ‘struggle sessions,’ dissecting Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s erotically-charged and award winning film ‘Lust, Caution’.

In a throwback to the heady days of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when politics determined the value of art, both the director and his literary inspiration, female writer Eileen Chang, have been flagellated for distorting politically correct narrative by suggesting that Chinese traitors could merit love.

Ang Lee’s film, which won the Gold Lion award for best picture at the Venice Film Festival, has been called "a sexually transmitted skin disease" and "a big poisonous weed" that is worthy of a criticism campaign spearheaded by the Communist party’s flagship ‘People’s Daily.’

In an intriguing twist the critics slamming the film and calling for its ban are not the infamous censors at the Communist propaganda bureau.

After enduring six edits and losing 12 minutes of its original version that had scenes of steamy sex and gory details, the film was approved by the arbiters of public taste for release here. And despite the cuts, Ang Lee’s work has quickly become a big commercial success in China, earning more than 90 million yuan (12 million US dollars) since opening two weeks ago.

The ‘struggle sessions’ of the film have been staged by diverse intellectual circles here, united in their nationalistic dislike for the way Ang Lee’s tragic melodrama renders the relationship between the occupier and the occupied. The perceived offence centres on the fact that the main female character Wong Chia Chi fails in her patriotic mission to assassinate a traitor because she succumbs to her tender feelings for him.

"’Lust, Caution’ is an insult to the good women of China," asserted Huang Jisu, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences scholar, at a recent discussion of the film organised by the Utopia Book Club in Beijing.

"This type of film – presenting Chinese men as always taking potency tonics and Chinese women as forever sexually dissatisfied – has become a type of new exotic Viagra for the West. But they have fabricated an insulting image of China on its knees. Chinese people have been standing up for more than 100 years and it is Ang Lee and his likes that are still kneeling."

‘Lust, Caution’ is set in the early 1940s, mostly in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and follows the developments of a classical honey trap. The heroine Chia Chi belongs to an idealistic acting troupe which, driven by a patriotic fervour, embarks on a plot to assassinate a Chinese official collaborating with the Japanese during the Sino-Japanese war.

But as their relationship – depicted in sensual slow strokes in the film -unfolds, it evolves from outright sexual domination by Yee, the male character, to a shattering intimacy between the two. When the moment to betray Yee comes, Chia Chi lets him escape the carefully prepared assassination plot.

Eschewing the subtleties preferred by conventional Chinese art form, Ang Lee opts for graphical and unabashedly physical depiction of the affair. As the liaison perilously swings between desperate desire and suspicion, it also shatters the historical conventions of right and wrong, replacing them with transcendent values of love.

It is here that the biggest clash of viewers’ opinions erupts. While members of the Utopia Book Club – a loose intellectual society with views leaning to the left – like to dwell on the film as an ideologically motivated reconstruction of China’s past, others see it as a darkly erotic attempt to present the complex nature of love. As one camp perceives an insult, the other cheers the triumph of humanity.

"I don’t like reading those reviews that excessively analyse the film as a historical discourse or interpret the original short story as a political text," says critic Chai Ziwen. "The story in the film could actually work against any historical background because it delves into the passion and cruelty that occupy the human heart. It is a film about the hopelessness and loneliness that no repression can ever suppress."

Adding even more layers to the debate is the fact that the story resonates on a personal level for both the director and the author.

Eileen Chang, who wrote some of her most celebrated stories in the 1940s at the time of China’s war of resistance against Japan, suffered the jabs of fellow intellectuals for her ill-fated romance with a man publicly known as a Japanese collaborator working for the puppet government.

Misunderstood in her love choices, Eileen Chang was equally misread by her contemporaries in her melancholic stories about doomed relationships set in cosmopolitan Shanghai before the 1949 communist takeover. Many of those stories about love and alienation were penned while the rest of Chinese intelligentsia was mobilising literature in the fight against Japanese invasion.

"Love is not about whether you deserve it or not," she wrote in the preface to her last collection which included ‘Lust, Caution.’ She started writing it in 1950, but revised it many times and did not publish it until 1979.

Like her, director Ang Lee, whose parents were exiles from mainland China and who was born in Taiwan but has lived and worked in the U.S. since the 1980s, is often perceived here in a controversial light. Critics admire his talent which has helped him win Oscars in the past, but deplore his individualistic artistic agenda which many think should serve China’s greater cultural interests.

At the Utopia Book Club discussion, film director Zhou Guojin suggested that ‘Lust, Caution’ should be classified as a "Chinese traitor movie," and alleged Ang Lee had used his past achievements to gain entry for the film into the China market.

Ang Lee though, appears to have been fully aware of the dangers he was facing by making the film.

"There are so many things in the story that Chinese would consider as immoral, such as sexual suggestions," he said at the time of the film’s U.S. premiere earlier this year. "It depicts the dark side of the heroic deeds, things we would feel uncomfortable with. But I decided to face it."

The polemic about the film in China is hardly contained within academic circles. The debate has also spilled into cyberspace where comments about ‘Lust, Caution,’ both disparaging and enthusiastic, have reached around 1.5 million in just several weeks, according to the ‘Southern Weekend’ newspaper.

Beyond the debate about love and patriotism, some critics saw the film as heralding the Renaissance in Chinese film culture by drawing audiences back to the cinemas to enjoy a different kind of blockbuster.

"The film has brought excitement to Chinese film experience and made cinemas become what they are supposed to be – fashionable centres of urban life," Zhang Yiwu, a scholar at Beijing University, said in his weekly column in the ‘Beijing Youth Daily.’ "’Lust, Caution’ has proven that Chinese-language films have the power to stand up to Hollywood."