Lust, Caution and the Empty Promise

Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee as an adaptation of a short story by popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang, begins in Japanese-occupied Shangai in 1942 with a scene of women playing a game of mahjong with their hostess, Yee Tai-tai. Most of the women are the wives of collaborationist Wang government officials, but one, Mak Tai-tai (Tang Wei), is supposedly the newcomer and wife of a successful Hong Kong businessman. These rich women gossip and complain about the war, the lack of good food and cigarettes and diamonds while outside their luxurious apartment in Shanghai people are starving and dying in the streets—in one scene the dead are thrown in carts like the carcasses of dead animals to be disposed of. These Chinese women with their curled hair, fedora hats, knee length trench coats, cigarettes, and painted nails seem to have come right out of Casablanca. Lee makes sure to capture this rubbing together of East and West not just in this scene with the women who don Chinese style dresses with Westernized hair playing this Chinese game while smoking cigarettes, but out on the streets as well with Western cars driving past man-pulled taxis.

This East meets West scenery and tension is apparent to all especially in scenes like the one where a screening of Penny Serenade is interrupted by a Japanese propaganda film. Under the surface, however, the tension is even greater. Ms. Mak is actually Wong Chia-chi, a Cantonese country girl who joined a group of Chinese resistance fighters. Four years before the scene with the women in Shanghai, Chia-chi, who is a student at Hong Kong University, is recruited for a part in a patriotic play by the handsome Kuang Yu Min (Wang Lee-hom), who is the director of a student theatre company. Moved by the reaction of the audience to their play, the troupe, persuaded by Kuang, decides to form their own resistance movement with the aim of assassinating a Chinese traitor, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-wai).

The plan consists of Chia-chi impersonating the wife of a well-to-do Chinese importer-exporter who seduces Mr. Yee and lures him out into the open where they can assassinate him. Chia-chi almost succeeds in luring Mr. Yee into the house, but he is too cautious to go in. The next thing they know, he and his wife are moving to Shanghai, and the operation has to be temporarily aborted. Three years later, Kuang who has joined a larger resistance group in Shanghai finds Chia-chi and convinces her to do it again. Mr. Yee has also moved up and is working for the Wang government’s secret service, torturing and murdering resistance fighters. The stakes on both sides are higher. Chia-chi agrees to do it, knowing that some how her body is the only way to this man, and so she transforms herself once again into the glamorous Mak Tai-tai and the world of chatty rich women and parlor games hoping to get closer to Mr. Yee.

It is ironic that the newcomer, the inexperienced actress, the innocent country girl who has to be taught by one of her fellow resistance fighters how to have sex in case she needs the knowledge with Mr. Yee, is the one chosen to play the role of the glamorous seductress, Mrs. Mak. She is the virginal sacrifice of the movement sacrificing her body and soul for its cause. However, her motivation for making such a sacrifice is ambiguous. There seems to be no deeply felt anger for those who betrayed China. If anything, she is driven by an unspoken love and admiration for Kuang, who is passionately wrapped up in his pride for his country and his anger for the loss of his brother to the war. He seems to care for Chia-chi at the beginning, but not more than the resistance itself. As the leader of the small resistance group, he probably chose Chia-chi for what he saw as the honorary lead role in this real-life play. In his mind, giving her this important role in a cause so dear to him was a way of showing his love. However, the consequences of this decision and his love reach far beyond what he could ever imagine.

Mr. Yee has lost little of the lust he had begun to develop for Mrs. Wak in Hong Kong, and when they meet again in Shanghai, he soon arranges for them to be alone together. Yee’s driver drops “Mrs. Mak” off at an old hotel and hands her the key to the room where Mr. Yee is waiting for her. He soon dispels the notion that he sees Chia-chi with any emotion other than lust. He begins their sexual relationship by ripping away her dignity. He tears off her clothes, pushes her, beats her, and makes the sex as painful and cold as possible on the dusty bed of the hotel room. She is shocked and instantly hardened like a soldier going through boot camp. However, also like a soldier, in her pain she forms an emotional connection to the inflictor.

As the movie progresses, Mr. Yee softens and the sex becomes less lust-making and more love-making. Although she never asks about his work, he begins to trust Chia-chi more and shares information about his job—tying her irreconcilably to him but also giving her more power. Meanwhile, Chia-chi is in turmoil because she realizes she is beginning to have feelings for the man whom she is helping to assassinate. At a meeting with one of the resistance leaders, she relates the pain and sexual humiliation Mr. Yee has caused her, but she also warns that he is worming his way into her heart—suggesting that soon she will not be able to betray him. The resistance leader doesn’t want to hear about her heart or her pain. While Kuang sympathizes with her and kisses her in an attempt to show how much he cares for her, it is too late. Chia-chi can no longer separate acting from real life. While in her mind she is still Chia-chi, resistance fighter, in her heart she is becoming Mrs. Mak, Mr. Yee’s lover.

The resistance soon pays the price for caring so little for Chia-chi’s heart. While the resistance was ignoring her heart, Mr. Yee was nurturing it. He buys her a ring—a seeming symbol of his possession of her, but he lets her pick out the stone and setting. Still with the resistance fighters in her mind, she arranges for them to be at the jewelers when she takes Mr. Yee with her to pick up the finished ring. As they look at the ring on her finger, Chia-chi sees the happiness and love, if this man is capable of that, on his face and she cannot go through with it. With tears in her eyes, knowing it means her own death and probably that of her resistance friends, she whispers “go now” in order to prevent his assassination. He flees from the store before the assassins get there.

In the next few scenes of the film, we learn that the Chia-chi’s friends never showed up to assassinate him because they were caught first. They were tortured into revealing all of the names of those involved with them including Chia-chi and her cover as Mrs. Mak. All of this is related to Mr. Yee after the incident at the jewelers. As usual protocol, they are to be shot. Mr. Yee orders the execution, not with malice as would have been expected of him earlier, but with a reluctant sense of inevitability that he cannot escape who he is even if he has learned what it is to love. As his head security officer leaves the house with the orders to execute them all, Mr. Yee goes and sits on the bed where Chia-chi had slept during her stay with him. All of her stuff has been removed so that the stark white bed looks emptier than ever. Mr. Yee sits on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, tears forming in his eyes. When he gets up and leaves, the camera lingers on the empty, white bed—the film’s parting shot symbolizing Chia-chi’s death but also the void left behind in Mr. Yee’s heart and the empty promise of the resistance.