Lust, Caution

I watched this film, directed by Ang Lee, last Friday night.  The hot sex, which earned it a NC-17 rating, was much anticipated.  But it was a long time coming. First we had to get through dry and mechanical sex between our heroine, Wang Jiazhi and a fellow resistance fighter. Then we had to endure Jiazhi's rape at the hand's of Mr. Yee, the Japanese collaborator whom she and the resistance had targeted to assassinate.  Only after all that -- and many games of Mahjong -- did we finally get to the hot sex.  And hot it was.  Undeterred by the rape, Jiazhi went at it with Mr. Yee in subsequent liaisons, all lust and no caution. One wondered if they'd ever tire.  One speculated that something besides sex was driving them. One came to understand that their physical connection was more real than any other facet of their lives, though Jiazhi remained loyal to her cause and Mr. Yee deeply distrusted her.  

In a penultimate scene, Jiazhi confessed to a resistance leader -- with candor that should have been heeded -- that every time she and Mr. Yee met for another sex assignation, they carried on until she bled.  He used his body like a snake, she said. He would work his way into her soul.  But it was she who was charged with that task. Would she be able to accomplish it before he did?  Who would win?  

Ultimately, they both lost.  Mr. Yee gave Jiazhi a card and told her to drop by a certain shop to speak directly with the man whose name was on the card.  "If he gives you something, take it," he said. It all sounded rather ominous.  It appeared that Mr. Yee was testing Jiazhi, by enlisting her services as a runner for the collaborators. But instead, when Jiazhi presented Mr. Yee's card at the shop, she was taken into a private room and asked to choose which stone and which setting she would prefer for the ring Mr. Yee wished her to have.  Astonished at this turn of events -- and recognizing that he was softening -- she made her selection.  She then promptly advised the resistance that she could at last identify a time and place to complete the assassination:  when she returned to the shop with Mr. Yee to collect the ring.  

At the appointed time, with resistance agents in place at every corner and in every surrounding vestibule, Mr. Yee and Jiazhi entered the shop.  When the jeweler presented the ring to her, Jiazhi was stunned by its beauty.  She asked Mr. Yee if he approved her selection.  Mr. Yee responded that he cared nothing for the ring, but only wished to see it on her.  He then gently slid the ring on her finger.  They locked eyes, and she said, very softly, "Go now."  Almost like an afterthought.  He was puzzled. She repeated, "Go now." His face changed as he apprehended her meaning, and he fled.

That evening, Mr. Yee signed Jiazhi's death warrant, and she and her fellow resistance agents were shot in the back of the head while kneeling at the edge of a quarry.  Mr. Yee did not bother to interrogate her, and when the ring that he'd bought her was returned to him, he denied that it was his.  Yet he returned to the room where she had stayed at his home, and his desolation was palpable as he contemplated the emptiness that lay before him. 

Jiazhi may well have regretted her "go now" in those moments before the bullet ended her consciousness.  But should she have?  Wasn't she right to be guided by the immediacy of her connection with Mr. Yee when he finally bared himself to her, without defense?  Isn't there something inhuman and immoral in a person who can elevate loyalty to a cause -- however justified -- above that? Yet had she done so, she would have saved her own life, the lives of her fellow fighters, and the lives of countless Chinese people resisting the brutal occupation of their country by Japan. 

I nevertheless tend to think that hers was the more moral choice.