CHINESE literature is more drawn than written. In a language composed of characters, as opposed to letters, each word becomes a picture, and every sentence a montage. As Ang Lee has put it, in particular reference to the title of his new film Lust, Caution, “the shape itself means something”. Pieces of that meaning have been lost in the translation from its original Mandarin name Se, Jie. On paper, the first character, se, might allude not just to sex but to life, and to colour, while jie may mean “warning” or “renunciation”, but could also represent a ring, which is a recurring symbol within the story. According to Lee, Chinese audiences have been slightly shocked by the juxtaposition of the two, even before watching the film, which already has a worldwide reputation for its erotic intensity and explicitness. Western audiences will see more of this, in cinemas which are not subject to China’s censorship laws.
But they may also feel that they are somehow missing something. “There is a lot of universality to it, ” says Lee, in a London hotel room around the corner from the Odeon Leicester Square, where Lust, Caution will later have its red-carpet premiere before opening in the UK on January 4. “People in Taiwan are moved just the same as people in the States. But if you don’t understand the language, I think that you romanticise it. That distance makes the story more romantic. To a Chinese audience, it is probably more realistic. It seems to me that I have never made a movie so specific to China, with so much difference between East and West. And I am pretty good at bridging those two.”
It is not characteristic of Lee to admit to being good at anything. Famously anxious in his work, as well as in person, he makes movies in the same way that Tolstoy is said to have written books – both resolved and tormented – and cannot discuss them without looking pained or frightened, resting his hand flat against the side of his face. “I . . . enjoy . . . talking about them, ” he insists, speaking very slowly and quietly, in not-quite-fluent English, with an accent that still sounds undecided between his native Taiwan and his adoptive home in the US.
“I think it is maybe theraputic for me . . . ” He does not deny that almost all of those films his debut feature The Wedding Banquet, his first American studio picture The Ice Storm, his international breakthrough hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have been the products of personal or professional crises. And as a man who has described himself as “repressed”, Lee made life especially difficult for himself in choosing to adapt Se, Jie, a strange and cruel short story by Eileen Chang, into a long and graphic psychosexual spy film.
“To make a movie like this, you have to let that repression out, ” he says. “It is very painful for someone like me, and I wouldn’t want to do it again, but you always have to find something new if you’re honest about your work. You have find another level of fear for it to feel real. Otherwise you are sorta faking it, like faking an orgasm, ha ha, which is kinda boring.” The sex scenes in Lust, Caution required full-frontal nudity from lead actors Tony Leung (who has become, over the last two decades, perhaps the most charismatic screen presence in the world) and Tang Wei (a relative newcomer who was cast in the role after 10,000 women had auditioned), but also prolonged and repeated displays of physical and emotional violence that exhausted the cast and crew. “As soon as we finish shooting, ” he says, “we all get sick. Everyone. Seriously. Boom.” This was not a new experience for him. Lee is often described as a sensitive film-maker, although this does not explain to his own satisfaction why every film he makes should appeal to so many more women than men. “You see it especially in China, if you go to my movies, ” he says.
“Any of my movies, whether it is a family drama or The Hulk [Lee’s only action blockbuster, an artful comic-book adaptation which was released to general bewilderment in summer 2003, is now regarded as one of the most resounding failures in recent Hollywood history]. The audience is always a sea of women. Maybe a few men, with their wives or their girlfriends. The rest, all women. That is very frustrating for me.” Lee takes these things so personally that he seems to absorb each movie into himself. The themes of the script, the problems encountered during production, the reviews, awards and box office receipts all of this is internalised, for good or ill. In the case of The Hulk, the pressures of trying to please himself, the studio, and the crowds, only added to the inherent creative tension of telling a silly yet serious story about the purest, greenest rage.
“Hulk was to do with anger, so you tune into that, and anything can make you mad. Internally, externally. The Iraq war. Physically, it was such a big endeavour that my body was protesting. I had problems with sleep. Then the distribution of that film really hurt me. And the negative comments. After that I thought of retiring, seriously. I am proud of Hulk, and I love film-making forever, there’s no stop to it, but I just didn’t think I could take any more.” He went on to make Brokeback Mountain, a relatively affordable and manageable adaptation of E Annie Proulx’s short story about the long-term, high-risk affair between a ranch-hand and a rodeo cowboy, only because it provided an opportunity to end his career on “a more benign note, so to speak”.
“That project moved me and scared me too, ” says Lee, “but I was thinking it was such a small movie that it wouldn’t matter. It was a story about love, and on set you could feel it, and when we finished I thought it would be OK if this is my last film. How wrong was I?” Brokeback Mountain turned out to be, in his words, “my salvation”, winning him an Oscar for Best Director in 2005. Nowhere in the world are the Academy Awards taken more seriously than China, which has a smaller, poorer film industry than its reputation suggests. There is no shortage of movielovers, but the majority prefer American exports, and particularly romantic Oscar-winners such as Titanic. Lee and his regular producer and screenwriter James Schamus were able to trade on their golden prize to fund and shoot an expensive and provocative film that effectively throws stage lights onto one of the many shadows in China’s modern history.
“I feel like I have the clout to do this, ” says Lee, “that probably no other director has in the world at this point. Certainly, no other Chinese film- maker would be allowed to do it.” Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Lust, Caution is the story of a young student actress drawn into a plot to seduce and assassinate a high-ranking member of Wang Jingwei’s puppet government, despised then and now for their collaboration with the Japanese invaders who had occupied most of north and east China. In that time and place, Eileen Chang was a popular author condemned by contemporaries whose own fiction then tended toward revolutionary rhetoric and barely-disguised Communist Party propaganda. When Mao and his followers established their People’s Republic in 1949, there was no room in it for her supposedly bourgeois tales about the love lives of Shanghai’s semi-Westernised women.
While her books were being erased from the collective memory, Chang left for Hong Kong and the US, where she began writing Se, Jie in the 1950s. It was not finished or published until 1979, and remained widely unknown and unread in her home country until after her death in 1995. Today, that story is considered Chang’s first and final attempt to address the politics of the period directly, if only to reassert her conviction that history is just background noise against which everyday melodramas are enacted in private. “This thing we call reality is unsystematic, ” she once wrote, “like seven or eight phonographs playing at the same time, each with its own tune, forming a chaotic whole. [And though] my characters are weak . . . average people, they are the ones who bear the burden of our age.” Chang herself was living proof, having apparently imagined this story out of bitterness over her own failed marraige to Wang Jingwei’s chief of judiciary, whom she abandoned in exile because of his infidelities.
Hulk aside, Lee has never made a film set in the present day. “I like elegiac feelings. Melancholy. I am not a hip person, so I don’t know what’s going on now. But I have a fantasy, an illusion of history, and in some ways it is more real than what I see around me, which I don’t trust. That’s why I make movies. History doesn’t go the way I want, ha ha.” In the case of Lust, Caution, he wanted to preserve something of Chang’s era. “If I don’t do it, then the old people will die, my parents’ generation will be gone, and nobody will remember the collaboration, the repression, the shame. Young people, Western people, non-Chinese people might not get it, but I feel the urge to save something on celluloid before it slips through our fingers, into oblivion.”
The autobiographical aspect also seems to have attracted Lee the fact that Se, Jie was such an atypical and unsafe piece of Chang’s work, almost three decades in the writing. He relates to her passion, and the care she took to conceal it. Most specifically, he responds to a scene from the story in which the protagonist Wong Chia Chi rides through Hong Kong on a tram with her fellow student actors, elated after making a show- stopping stage debut, but too genuinely modest to discuss it.
“She’s awakening, ” he says. “She feels the power.” Lee felt the same way when he fell into acting at Taiwan’s National Arts School, having failed twice to qualify for an engineering degree, thus creating a well-documented and long-standing rift with his father, which was only recently repaired. Lee alters and expands the scene in question, which comes closer to film magic than any other in his movie, and may even run counter to Eileen Chang’s argument that no harmony is possible between the personal and the historical.
“That is a classic scene, ” he says, as if someone else directed it, “because it means something to me, and to the character, and to all Chinese people. It sounds silly, but if people don’t see Chinese people being shy, then they will forget that’s how we used to be. “Because we’re not shy any more, and 10 years from now that shyness won’t exist even in memory. I feel missionary, making this movie.” This is an unfortunate choice of word, given that the film itself will likely be longer and better remembered for its sex scenes except, of course, in China, and the other Asian nations where the most explicit footage was cut, with Lee’s participation. “People ask me, ‘Why did you cut your own movie?’, but if I don’t then it does not come out at all in my own country. And you know, it’s a milder version, but that audience will still get the story, the feelings.
They will still get the shock when she lets the traitor go. Just the idea of this film, and allowing it to be filmed, is a big step forward in China.” Presumably, most of that audience will be women? “Yes. I can’t explain that, except to say that I am not a macho man. I try to do macho things in this film, all the killing, burning, demolishing, brutality, confusion, but I seem to be more interested in the woman who is sleeping with the traitor. If she comes, does that make her a traitor too? These are the questions that keep me making movies. Is there another way I can live my life? Can I be a better person? Is this the angel side of me, or the devil side? I ask myself these things, but then I always go on to the next project.”
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