Lust, Caution

2007 glacier

Rating: 14/20

Plot: In Japanse-occupied Shanghai, future-whore Mai Tai Tai and her university drama student friends naively attempt to assassinate Mr. Yee, a important Japanese official. It doesn't work out so well, but a few years later, a guy recruits them to try again. Mai Tai Tai works to become first a friend of Yee's wife, then an occupant of his house, and finally his mistress. They do it, repeatedly and roughly, and the time soon arrives when the crazy kids can get a shot at their man.

I liked the last third of the movie a lot better than the first two-thirds, but it couldn't completely save this one. This was so deliberately paced, too deliberately paced, and it was really hard for me to focus for two and a half hours. Scenes were stretched so much that the minutia squeezed to the surface from their pores, and I'm sure Ang Lee thought the minutia was important for the audience to see, but I'm not completely sure that's the case. This movie could have been a lot shorter. Lee had the same problem with the overrated Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger which both had scenes that were far too long, and his Incredible Hulk movie which was about two hours too long. I know the feelings between the two characters had to be given time to become believable, but I'm not really even sure they were all that believable. When the movie ended, I was convinced that the guy was a creep, albeit a creep with feelings (Tony Leung Chiu Wai who, I noticed after glancing at his filmography I've seen in a ton of movies, is very very good) but that the woman was nothing more than a materialistic whore. But maybe that was the point. I'm not the type of movie watcher who typically loses patience with slow-moving dramas, but I did lose patience with this one, and it's definitely a movie I respected more than I enjoyed.