Fridae

Here is the movie we've all been waiting for. Lust, Caution is Lee Ang's first film since the groundbreaking gay movie Brokeback Mountain. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival last month, it clinched the Golden Lion Award for Best Film and has opened strongly in Asian countries like Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Set in 1942 when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation, the film stars lovely newcomer Tang Wei as a simple country girl who is recruited by a band of young resistance fighters to seduce and murder a top-ranking official (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) of the collaborationist government.

Pretending to be a tai tai married to a businessman, she manages to ingratiate herself with Tony's wife's (Joan Chen) circle of friends who meet to play mahjong regularly at Tony's house. Her accidental brushes with Tony along the corridors and rooms gradually evolve into a steamy affair...

Lust, Caution is an extraordinary period piece that feels precise and carefully-crafted from its first frame to its last. Lee Ang has always demonstrated an extraordinary ability to recreate any historical era of any place - from the sexual revolution of the 1970s in The Ice Storm to the Victorian world of Sense & Sensibility. Lust, Caution captures the sights and sounds Shanghai in the 1940s like no other movie this reviewer can recall.

The acting is uniformly strong, lending a strong psychological backbone to this spy-thriller. Tang Wei, who seems too distant and withdrawn at first, gradually impresses you with her multi-faceted performance. Tony Leung is spectacular as always, and the film doesn't feel completely satisfying until he starts to play a bigger role in it in the later half. Joan Chen delivers one of her more nuanced performances, while pop star Wang Lee-Hom broods adequately.

We have come to expect nothing but excellent work from Lee Ang, and he doesn't disappoint. As for the fact that we are seeing a much tamer version of the film (the controversial sex scenes have been shortened for the Singapore and China audiences), all we can say is: Get the uncut DVD when you're next in Taiwan or Hong Kong or Bangkok.