Lust, Caution

[MacGuffin]

Film could ease ratings stigma
Audiences are wary of NC-17. Ang Lee's newest work may change that.
Source: Los Angeles Times

The NC-17 rating has long been the movie industry's equivalent of the scarlet letter.

Slap the label on a movie and audiences would shun it, many theater owners would refuse to show it and the film certainly would be a long shot for an Academy Award.
 
But some in Hollywood are hoping the latest film by Taiwanese director Ang Lee will change the way American audiences perceive the NC-17 label. Lee's movie "Brokeback Mountain" shattered Hollywood convention when the stereotype-busting picture about gay cowboys catapulted into the mainstream two years ago and won him an Academy Award for best director.

Now, theater owners are being encouraged by their trade group to show his latest film, "Lust, Caution," an erotic spy thriller that opens in the U.S. today. The picture, rated NC-17, opened briskly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it was released earlier this week.

"If Ang Lee does well, then maybe others will follow and we can get rid of these myths that have created challenges for this rating," said John Fithian, president of the National Assn. of Theatre Owners.

That would reverse a stigma attached to the NC-17 rating since 1990, when the Motion Picture Assn. of America created the label to replace the "X," which had been co-opted by the porn industry. The designation, which means no one 17 or under will be admitted, is reserved for sexually explicit movies.

But such fare is readily available on TV and the Internet, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable and inflaming critics who say America's values are being corroded.

Studio executives contend that the NC-17 rating is too broad, lumping movies such as "Orgazmo" and "Whore" with films from such noted directors as Pedro Almodovar, Bernardo Bertolucci and David Cronenberg.

"It is hard for audiences to distinguish what the rating means," said Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. He noted that Almodovar's 2004 film "Bad Education" suffered in part because of its NC-17 rating and was not among his highest-grossing films. "People perceive they might get an unpleasant surprise and so they stay away. That's a problem."

It wasn't always so. In the late 1960s and '70s, major directors such as John Schlesinger, Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet and Bertolucci made X-rated movies with big-name actors including Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss and Lynn Redgrave.

Instead of shying away from the films, the entertainment industry backed them. In 1969, Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy" won an Oscar for best picture. Five years later, Bertolucci and Brando received best director and actor Oscar nominations, respectively, for the sultry "Last Tango in Paris."

Today, Hollywood studios generally shy away from backing NC-17 films, with the exception of specialty labels such as Focus Features and Fox Searchlight and some independent distributors.

"Lust, Caution," which Focus made for about $15 million, is based on a short story by Eileen Chang. A period piece set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the 1940s, the film follows a young woman assigned to seduce and kill a high-ranking Chinese collaborator. It earned the NC-17 stamp because its intimate interludes and Kama Sutra-inspired lovemaking are tinged with the violent passion of a forbidden and dangerous relationship.

Focus, Universal Pictures' specialty label, did not challenge the rating.

James Schamus, Focus' chief executive and cowriter of the film's screenplay, is determined to show that mainstream American audiences are ready for "grown-up" movies with erotic themes, just as they proved ready to embrace a film about love between two cowboys. Focus was the producer and distributor of "Brokeback Mountain."

"Very few films have accepted the rating because they assume people will be turned off," said Schamus, Lee's longtime collaborator. "That is the assumption we are questioning. I am not saying this will be a slam-dunk, commercial movie, but we may well have made the film that changes NC-17 in the culture. I think the time has come."

Focus plans to launch an Oscar campaign for "Lust, Caution" and is capitalizing on some of the buzz the film garnered this month after winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. In the U.S., the film has received mixed reviews. Lee has said he has low expectations for the movie, not because of its rating but because of its quiet pace and Mandarin language.

In addition, the lingering association between NC-17 and X-rated fare can take a toll at the box office. Films labeled as NC-17 sell as many as 25% fewer tickets, studio executives said. The highest-grossing NC-17 film was "Showgirls," a 1995 film that brought in $20.4 million.

Certain theater circuits such as Cinemark, one of the nation's largest exhibitors, have policies prohibiting the showing of NC-17 films.

Focus is lobbying chains to reconsider the policy and has found an ally in Fithian, who has been trying to mobilize the members of the National Assn. of Theatre Owners to support the movie. He brought up the issue at the group's annual gathering in Chicago last week.

"We are strongly encouraging our members to give due consideration to this picture and what it means, which is that if you take a good filmmaker and take a good film and make it NC-17 it can be commercially viable," Fithian said this week in an interview.

Cinemark said Thursday that it was standing by its policy.

In an effort to persuade exhibitors to play the movie, Focus executives have compiled a list of images and descriptions of other films that have played in their theaters without controversy, such as the R-rated horror films "Hostel: Part II" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning," which graphically show maiming, torture and killing.

"I don't want my film rejected on moral grounds by people who are willing to show movies where women's breasts are literally ripped off," Schamus said. "That is just hypocritical."

That supposed hypocrisy is one of the most bedeviling issues facing the entertainment industry. The NC-17 causes problems for studios when negotiating the pay television and DVD deals they rely on to turn a profit. Even though HBO airs such violent programs as "The Sopranos" and the popular but explicit "Real Sex," it typically does not accept NC-17-rated content.

Home video distribution giant Blockbuster Inc. does not carry NC-17-rated movies in its stores or online. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, does not stock NC-17 films. However, most home video retailers do carry unrated "director's cut" movies that include scenes they could not include in the "R" version for theaters.

Focus has made an R-rated version of "Lust, Caution" for the home video market and has not yet embarked on negotiations with cable channels.

The company is marketing the movie primarily to women, the audience that drove strong box-office sales for "Brokeback Mountain." The studio is veering away from ads that show titillating sex scenes, which attract mainly men, and is instead selling it as a dangerous spy thriller from an Oscar-winning director.

Some production companies prefer releasing a movie with no rating instead of being stuck with an NC-17. The major studios don't have a choice because they are part of the MPAA, which requires a rating on all movies released by its members.

Bob Berney, head of Time Warner Inc.'s specialty film company Picturehouse, said the popularity of its film "Pan's Labyrinth," a tragic Spanish-language period piece, showed that Americans seem to have developed a more discerning film palate in recent years.

"We thought nobody wanted to see a gay cowboy movie and nobody wanted to see a dark, Spanish period movie," he said. "If anyone can break the mold [regarding the NC-17 label], it would be Ang Lee."

[picolas]

i declare this movie to be.. AWESOME.
- can't fully absorb it in one viewing.. i don't want to spoil anything.
- i have NO IDEA how the bad reviews can say this is 'boring'. this is the opposite of boring.
- i finally realized (and i'm way late on this) the thing that links all of lee's diverse works is love in impossible circumstances. unpursuable love..
- if you've ever been involved in theatre the experience of watching this is even sweeter.
- there are many moments that successfully combine extreme suspense or tragedy or.. bravery with hilarity somehow.
- brilliant everything, cinematography, acting, directing, editing, etc.

[pete]

no real spoilers, but still, look away if you wanna remain 100% pure




I would think one thing that links all of Ang Lee's stories together is the main character's struggle between doing what s/he wants and doing what the rest of the world expect him/her to do.  in a sweeter movie like the wedding banquet, there is a sweeter compromise, but in harsher movies like brokeback, it's a little bit sadder to say the least.
Ang Lee is such a great director.  Or he CAN be such a great director.  When he remains duly focused on the core of his story, such as the case here, he can produce some really intense scenes.  the graphic sex is really disturbing, because the scenes are so integral to the movie and you know what is at stake.  I think with this film and Brokeback, it is safe to consider Lee to be one of the greats.  We can finally balance out his more spectacular but less satisfying ventures.

[Pubrick]

I think with this film and Brokeback, and especially HULK, it is safe to consider Lee to be one of the greats.

fixed.

[pete]

I think Ang Lee should have a board.  if not by himself, then share one with Spike Lee or something.

[hedwig]

ang lee/spike lee/mike leigh. 

[ponceludon]

I'm glad someone posted on this thread again, because the search function wasn't working for me earlier.

Spoilers:

At the risk of sounding like That Person, I was really moved by the way this film addressed feminism. Ang Lee has always had really good female characters, but it's been a while since a woman was the main character. More than just a film about love or the unattainable, I think it's also about the way a society can misuse a woman. From practically the first scene, the main character is a tool used by the Communist Party for theatrical propaganda, and then she is used by the amateur theater kids, then by the organized revolutionary cell. Each step along the way, she shows hesitation, but submits without protest, which leads to her disgraceful and seemingly futile deflowering and eventual death. Only once does she speak her mind, but is completely shut out by her contact, and her outburst is cheapened by the pointless sympathy of the actor who initially recruited her and who tries to make amends by kissing her.

I hadn't read this thread, so I didn't even know it was NC-17 until I read the ticket stub. I would have seen it anyway, though, since the combination of Ang Lee and Tony Leung seemed like a winning combination. But I was really impressed, more than I thought I would be. Nothing makes my day quite like a beautifully heartbreaking film.

[pete]

I don't think they were communists.

[ponceludon]

Nationalists! Whoops.

[w/o horse]

It's a movie that seems to package in a whole world.  I was slightly impressed by the narrative and how Lee navigated the story so comprehensively.  It opens up the characters and the time.  But it didn't penetrate me like his other films have  (unintentional Brokeback pun).  It didn't even really move me.  Beautiful and well made, but I just wasn't there for it.  Two or three scenes will stay with me.  Might require a later revisiting.

[MacGuffin]

'Fang' Lee: cruel but true
Ang Lee pushes his actors to the brink, Stephanie Bunbury reports.
Source: The Age

ACCORDING to film-buff legend, Ang Lee is the industry's Clark Kent. Under that mild-mannered exterior — consisting of a gentle-to-inaudible speaking voice, self-deprecating manner and an overall Zen calm — lurks a driven obsessive, a Caligula among directors who will stop at nothing to realise his vision.

Hard to believe here in Venice, where he receives phalanxes of eager interviewers with unflagging politeness in the garden of one of the city's grandly faded hotels but this is the man Hugh Grant dubbed "Fang Lee" after making Sense and Sensibility with him. Even laid-back Heath Ledger said after Brokeback Mountain that the director — who was smiling beatifically at his side as he spoke — drove him and Jake Gyllenhaal to the outer limit of physical endurance in freezing temperatures.

And now we hear that masterly Hong Kong actor Tony Leung was so exhausted by shooting the sex scenes in his new film, Lust, Caution, that he was close to collapse. Lee, he said later, always wanted more: another detail, another way to film a scene, another layer of self peeled away to reveal the rawness beneath.

The sweaty realism of these scenes — inviting the inevitable question "did they or didn't they?" — has been the film's chief talking point since it won the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival in September last year. So did they? "I leave that to you to decide," says Caligula in the softest voice imaginable. What he is prepared to admit is that, as usual, it was very difficult. Ten minutes of sex, real or not, reportedly took a gruelling 100 hours to film.

"None of us enjoys it," Lee said at the time. "By nature it's very uncomfortable, draining and painful." They are not pornographers, he said; his own instinct was to look away as the camera rolled. Even directing the actors beforehand was excruciating because, as he talked through these scenes, he had to expose himself and his own desires. "We're just common people. It felt pretty harsh. But we used the pain. We enjoyed the pain." The scenes were crucial to the unfolding story of an affair between sworn enemies.

Lust, Caution is set in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of China, before and during World War II. It is immersed in its troubled time and seedy place; you can practically smell the camphorwood. Accordingly, it opens with a game of mah-jong between society ladies, the rattle of the tiles somehow suggestive of the splintery relationships of these women and their men.

Mah-jong, says Lee, is "an enclosed war. It is about power, suspicion and calculation". Filming the game is an intrigue in itself. The glances at table soon reveal, for example, that the young and glamorous Mak Tai-Tai (newcomer Wang Tei) has more than a passing acquaintance with the hostess' sinister husband, Mr Yee (Tony Leung).

Mr Yee is a man of position. But we know his position is dependent on his quisling collaboration with the occupying forces, on whose behalf he tortures and executes anyone suspected of rebel tendencies. What he doesn't know is that his plaything, Mrs Mak, is idealistic nationalist Wong Chia Chi, sent by her student cell to seduce him and lure him to his death at their hands.

Or does he know, in fact, that she is not what she seems? As an interrogator, Mr Yee also has a strong line in pretence. The only certain thing for him, it seems, is pain; you know where you are with a bruise. "There is a line where she says 'I hate you' and he says 'I believe you, even though I don't believe anything any more' ", Lee muses.

"I think it's true. That pleasure you feel when someone is smiling and being tender to you: you don't know if they are pretending or not. Through their lovemaking you can see he wants the truth, though he doesn't know what that is any more." Sex becomes a kind of interrogation, escalated by violence, through which they both "have an actual taste of love, although of course they have to deny it."

Like Brokeback Mountain, Lust, Caution is a film of epic scale — almost three hours — spun from a short story. The story written by Hong Kong writer Eileen Chang was a mere 28 pages but it had a profound impact on Ang Lee. "I was raised in a patriarchal society, very patriotic, with a lot of grand illusions," he says. His own parents were exiles who clung to the old ways, schooling him in the manners and mores of a China that had been destroyed by modernity, just as surely in Taiwan as on the mainland.

To see that lost and venerated world through the prism of female sexuality was extraordinary — and a far more terrifying taboo-buster for him, he says, than a story about gay cowboys. Chang's story, he says, revealed that the familiar story of patriotism had its dark side. "They (historians) tell you about the glorious war. They don't tell you it is very hard to kill someone. They tell you that the women spies seduced the men and killed them. They don't tell you about the sex," Lee told The Guardian.

The story immediately struck him as "very cruel and very true" in the way it paralleled two kinds of hostile relationship: the subjugation of one nation by another and the relationship between a man and a woman. Lee recoiled from Wong's betrayal of her country for this rat of a man but he recognised it as real. There comes a moment when she must choose whether to deliver him to his death or not. "And at the moment when the guy looks her in the eyes, it breaks my heart. This is such a fragile moment, the way your heart is raised to her."

In some ways, he says, Wong Chia Chi is his alter-ego. She comes to her role in espionage through student theatre. "When she goes on stage, it changes her life. She went out with her friends on a high. Exactly the same thing happened to me when I was 18," he said an interview with the online magazine indieWIRE. Through performance, she discovers herself. "She knows she's playing a part. Yet by playing a part she reaches the truth. I think what they both feel is very real, even though they have doubts.

"It's like me making a movie — somehow your task is not the reality of you but it is probably the truth of what you are, some hidden power inside."

What this film and Brokeback taught the long-married Lee, he told The Guardian, is that he is a desperate romantic at heart. And when Wong Chia Chi spends her afternoons at the movies, weeping with Ingrid Bergman and sighing over Cary Grant, it could be him up there.

"I think movies do draw a theatrical character. Going to a movie, hiding in a dark house: she cries easily, which explains how she cries so easily on stage. And I figure that the mannerisms, the way she behaves, the way she plays Mak she could take from an international movie star like Ingrid Bergman. In a way she is in her first movie."

This was, indeed, Wang Tei's first film. "I didn't want the regular or popular look ... The first time she walked in, I just had the sense that she's Wong Chia Chi. She has a disposition that belongs to my parents' generation. In real life, she's probably a fish out of water because she's so different."

Wang Tei's acting experience was limited to a few television appearances. He says she put herself entirely in his hands. "I think Tang Wei doesn't know what happened," he says with a laugh. "Tony, on the other hand, once you have set the camera and the lighting, he knows the deal. It is like there is an implicit understanding of what I want to do and we do it. So I think it was more of a challenge for him."

Eileen Chang was herself a film critic; in the 1960s she started writing screenplays. Even the short story on which Lust, Caution is based was written like a film, says Lee. "It has inter-cutting, flashbacks, all those things."

He did not adapt it directly, however. "I think of it almost like jazz," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "You take a theme, then you take off. (The story) is only 28 pages long and a lot of things are suggested. Also, she's such a writer, you cannot merely translate what's on the page; you would only look stupid." Instead, he said in a companion book about making the film, he kept "returning to (Chang's) theatre of cruelty".

"You keep finding so many things in the writing that suggest there are so many layers. You just get deeper and deeper and you realise you are in her trap. It does feel like hell sometimes. You get moody; you get obsessed."

The actors had to travel that journey too. "We had actors willing to strip naked, go for the ultimate performance and see if they came out alive." Of course, he drove them to the brink. "That's the thrill," he says. "We tried to elevate a hellish experience to an artistic level that will speak to people. Then people think you're honest." He laughs. "Instead of crazy." He is still speaking just above a whisper but you catch the gleam of a fang.

[godardian]

Maybe apart from the explicitness of the sex, this movie played, to my mind, like some great Warner Brothers melodrama of the 1940s. The visuals were gorgeous, but not just for decoration; so much is expressed, so much of the movie's aura created with all the wonderful period detail. (This is something Lee does quite well; both Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain are really "period" films, too, but he makes them so much more than that that they don't just get lumped into that category.) Anyway, I was sad that as much wasn't made of this as his English-language films. I agree with pete, he is one of the greats. He's a quiet great who makes films in the classical vein and almost always pulls it off so very well.

[pete]

not sure why I left this out in my original post, but I felt like this movie was very much a "true" femme fatale story.  on a deeper level, it explores sexuality, its illusions, expectations, and usage, but on a formal level, it picks apart the femme fatale myth that's been with us since the beginning of time.  Ang Lee creates a very specific setting with very distinct characters, but goes to show how cruel it is to put a little girl through all that.  The film's so relentless with the sex scenes because it wants you to know that, make no mistake, this shit is inhumane.  the sex scenes are integral and expositional, but obviously not in the traditional way.  it is not like james bond who finds out plot twists after fucking a girl, they're dialogue free, but they do provide insight and understanding that are hard to obtain through other storytelling means.