![]() ![]() Tang Wei spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, and Shanghainese. Etiquette at the mah-jongg table the omnipresent yet understated background of wartime occupation political interests in the Chinese Civil War era the weight of regional identity in dialects and interpersonal relationships. While mainstream cinema should be, you know, self-sustaining or whatever you want to call it, there's really a lot to this movie that gets lost in subtitling to an extent, but also just in context and culture. The film struck quite a few personal nerves on my part too. She convincingly transforms herself from a naive college girl to coy seductress.and back again. ![]() While not as physically alluring as some of her competitors for the role - Chinese language actresses including Zhou Xun and Shu Qi - I don't think anyone else could have pulled it off like Tang. She portrays both roles with heartbreaking deftness a great casting choice if there ever was one. Mai are fraught with a psychological tension, doubling with the political agenda at stake as well as her womanhood. Because of the nature of the film's protagonist Wang Jiazhi (played by a newcomer named Tang Wei - not shabby for your first feature) as an agent working under a second identity to ensnare a dangerous collaborationist (Tony Leung), all the scenes where Wang masquerades as the bourgeois Ms. Steeped in the historically and culturally turbulent period of the second Sino-Japanese War, one must applaud Ang Lee for the dizzying array of minutiae he oversaw as director. The film was a beautifully executed "espionage thriller," if you want to go with how it's being marketed to a broad audience. I had been hyping myself up a great deal for Lust, Caution ever since I first heard of the project, so I'm glad to say that it did not disappoint. ![]()
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