‘Lust, Caution’
Is Sumptuous But
Frosty, Repetitive
‘Michael Clayton’ Goes
From Bleak to Poignant
October 5, 2007
Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution,” set in Shanghai
during the Japanese occupation of China in World War II, grew — and
grew — out of a short story by the late Eileen Chang. The story, about
a young spy for the resistance and her intended victim, is remarkable
for its complexity and density; it’s almost freeze-dried, yet
accessible to the imagination. In a few dozen pages Chang’s narrative
suggests the intricacies and ambiguities of sexual and political
conquest, the shifting frontier between eroticism and love, and the
paradox of theatrical performance, a process of becoming by way of
pretending. The 157-minute film, in Mandarin with English subtitles,
expands on all those themes, and adds explicit sex scenes that have
earned an NC-17 rating. Sumptuously produced and beautifully
visualized, this is a filmmaker’s meditation on the culture that
nurtured him. As a piece of entertainment, however, it’s hoist by its
own paradox — an almost thrill-free thriller that seems seductive, yet
stays resolutely remote.
![[Wei Tang]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/HC-GK779_Tang_20071004185950.jpg)
The heroine, Wong Chia-Chih (an impressive screen
debut by Tang Wei), is a movie fan with a gift for acting that she
discovered as a college student; since her story resonates with
“Notorious” and “Suspicion,” we’re treated to fleeting Hitchcock clips.
(The plot is also similar to Paul Verhoeven’s recent, and shamelessly
entertaining, “Black Book.”) Pressed into service by young activists
who loathe the puppet government installed by Japan, Wang pretends to
be Mrs. Mak, the wife of a Hong Kong businessman, insinuates herself
into the household of a brutal government official, Mr. Yee, and
seduces him in order to set him up for assassination.
He’s played by Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, the Hong Kong
actor who was so hypnotically soulful in “In the Mood for Love.” This
time his character conceals the existence of a soul as best he can –
the caution of the title is just as important as the lust. What he soon
reveals of himself is a sexual ferocity that befits a man who does the
lethal bidding of a brutal government. But Mr. Yee is not only a brute,
and Wong Chia-Chih is not only an apprentice pretender trying to pull
off a layered role — that of an ambitious, materialistic adulteress
who falls victim to her own passion. Human interactions, the film says
– and by extension international relations — are more tangled than we
can know or imagine.
![[Lust, Caution]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/WK-AK201_tv3_20071004182617.jpg) |
| Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Tang Wei play the devious romantic couple in Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution.” |
There’s so much to ponder in the screen adaptation by
Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus that I kept wondering, while watching,
why I found the action so uninvolving, and the rhythms so repetitive.
The answer for me lies in the movie’s relentlessly somber, self-serious
tone. “Lust, Caution” is obviously not an occasion for frivolity; it’s
about urgent purposes, closed-off characters and fateful events. Still,
some emotional variety would have been welcome, at least around the
edges. Take that cell of revolutionary students, the college kids who
draft Wong Chia-Chih for her dangerous mission. They are, in reality,
foolish dabblers and screw-ups who might have become overtly comic
characters in an early movie by Godard. Not here, though. Apart from a
couple of amusing lines, they’re deadly earnest and quite lifeless.
And the heroine’s motivation is playful at first; at
least that’s what we’re told, if not shown. Like many shy,
introspective people, she discovers that acting turns her on to the
point of personal liberation. Indeed, the performer’s high is essential
to the film’s equation. Mr. Yee, too, is liberated by role-playing –
his own as well as hers. Yet there’s rarely a trace of zest in what she
does, and no relief from the impassive face he turns to the world,
except in their sexual encounters, which are less erotic than athletic,
acrobatic or even geometric in their graphic intensity. A freeze-dried
story has been only partially defrosted.
‘Michael Clayton’
“Michael Clayton,” with George Clooney as a
world-weary fixer for a fancy corporate law firm, takes a different
tack in its dramatic development. Tony Gilroy’s film, which marks his
feature debut as a director, seems terribly abstract at first; this is
a story of disparate pieces that demands close attention. But investing
one’s attention pays off. The pieces come together into a stirring
portrait of a man reclaiming his soul from a scrap heap of discarded
principles. Mr. Gilroy’s script is a relatively literal-minded
companion piece to “The Devil’s Advocate,” a delightfully spirited
fantasy that he co-wrote (and Taylor Hackford directed). But that’s all
right; the mind at work on this film is a sharp one, and Al Pacino’s
earlier extravagance as Lucifer at law has its counterpart in Mr.
Clooney’s affecting gravity.
![[Michael Clayton]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/WK-AK202_tv4_20071004182729.jpg) |
| George Clooney in “Michael Clayton” |
Given who Clayton was — an assistant district
attorney from a blue-collar family of cops — and the compulsive
gambler and haunted, divorced father he’s become, he can never be a
source of much extravagance. But that’s provided in abundance — in
overabundance, actually — by Tom Wilkinson’s performance as the law
firm’s star litigator, Arthur Edens, who is brilliant but explosively
bipolar. When Edens threatens, in an access of grandiosity, to blow the
lid off the firm’s expensive defense of an agrochemical company,
U/North with blood on its hands, it’s Michael Clayton’s task to reel
the rogue colleague in, and Clayton’s fate to see his own moral squalor
in the mirror of Edens’s principled dementia. (Sydney Pollack plays the
firm’s co-founder, a lower-key Lucifer named Marty Bach, while Tilda
Swinton plays U/North’s in-house chief counsel; she’s no angel either.)
Most of the people in “Michael Clayton” are on the
edge, and their intensity can be oppressive. So, too, can the incessant
drumming of the sound track; it’s the curse of Tan Dun, plus the
prologue of “NYPD Blue,” in a film of essential seriousness — and
considerable bleakness — that’s been juiced up with suspense elements
and a conventional car chase. But George Clooney’s film noir
sensibility in the title role feels authentic, and admirably solid.
“I’m not a miracle worker, I’m a janitor,” the fixer tells a client who
suddenly finds himself in a terrible fix. Be that as it may, Clayton is
a poignant pilgrim in warm pursuit of a state of grace.