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Lust, Caution

7.2

8,828

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Original title

Se Jie (Lust, Caution)

Year

2007

Running time

156 min.

Country

Taiwan

Director

Ang Lee

Screenwriter

James Schamus, Wang Hui-Ling. Story: Eileen Chang

Cast

Music

Alexandre Desplat

Cinematography

Rodrigo Prieto

Producer

Haishang Films, Focus Features, River Road Entertainment, Sil-Metropole Organisation, Shanghai Film Group

Genre

Thriller. Drama. Romance | 1940s

Synopsis

Shanghai, 1942. The World War II Japanese occupation of this Chinese city continues in force. Mrs. Mak, a woman of sophistication and means, walks into a café, places a phone call, and then sits and waits. She remembers how her story began several years earlier, in 1938 China. She is not in fact Mrs. Mak, but shy Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei). With WWII underway, Wong has been left behind by her father, who has escaped to England. As a freshman at university, she meets fellow student Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom). Kuang has started a drama society to shore up patriotism. As the theater troupe's new leading lady, Wong realizes that she has found her calling, able to move and inspire audiences – and Kuang. He convenes a core group of students to carry out a radical and ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Each student has a part to play; Wong will be Mrs. Mak, who will gain Yee's trust by befriending his wife (Joan Chen) and then draw the man into an affair. Wong transforms herself utterly inside and out, and the scenario proceeds as scripted – until an unexpectedly fatal twist spurs her to flee.

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Awards: 2007: Venice Film Festival: Golden Lion (Best Film) & Best Cinematography

2007: Nominated for Golden Globe: Best Foreign Language Picture

2007: BAFTA Awards: 2 Nom., Best Costume Design and Foreign Languaje Film

2008: Guldbagge Awards (Sweden): Best Foreign Language Film

2007: Critics' Choice Awards: 2 Nom., Best Foreign Language Film, Composer

2007: National Board of Review: Top 5 - Foreign Films

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Critics' reviews

"[Ang] Lee is a true master, and his potently erotic and suspenseful Lust, Caution casts a spell you won't want to break."

Peter Travers: Rolling Stone
"I didn't feel the love between the flowering idealist and the ruthless killer. If I did, I would have given the movie four stars. Everything else is wonderful."

Jack Mathews: New York Daily News
"Lust, Caution is a disappointment coming from director Ang Lee, but it's a watchable one, and it rattles around in your head for a long time after you've seen it, as much for what it does right as for where it goes wrong."

Ty Burr: Boston Globe
"Stylized and visually arresting, with intense sex scenes that earned the film an NC-17 rating, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is an immersion into another time, place and mentality."

Mick LaSalle: SFGATE
"There's too much caution and not enough lust."

Rene Rodriguez: Miami Herald
"A brooding meditation on the unnerving power and terrible cost of emotional and political masquerades, the Chinese-language Lust, Caution gets under your skin with its examination of what qualifies as love and what does not"

Kenneth Turan: Los Angeles Times
"The film looks gorgeous but the plotting is clumsy and the acting is flat."

Ray Bennett: The Hollywood Reporter
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Lust, Caution

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