I found the new Ang Lee movie, “Lust, Caution” an engrossing movie. It’s a Chinese WWII spy movie in which a traitorous Chinese collaborator is the main enemy rather than a Japanese. It is plenty sad, particularly the ending, and powerful in a good Ang Lee way. I realized afterwards that while many other movies portray the sadness of this era by showing Chinese getting killed or tortured or mistreated somehow by Japanese, there was not a single violent gunshot in this film.
In one camera angle of a Shanghai street, pedestrians walked while avoiding a man laying down. It’s only when the camera pans closer that you see a puddle of blood near his head. In another scene in which good Chinese patriots are about to be shot by a cliff, the camera pans to the cliff and the river below, jerking my heart all around, and all without any gunshot sound FX.
One thing I like about this movie has nothing to do with the movie itself but rather the fact that it is based on a short story by Chang Ailing, a Chinese writer and hero to the Chinese people. (Chinese are always eager to worship another hero.) I promise there are no spoilers here, but she based her short story on her relationship with her first husband, a Japanese collaborator who was married to another woman when she first met her. That husband eventually left her for another woman, and she left China in 1955, never to return. She settled here in the States and died in Los Angeles in the 90s after a life of writing literature. She never felt very successful about her life, though many Chinese, my parents included, believe that if any Chinese were awarded a Noble Prize for literature, that it should belong to Chang Ailing.
