Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007)

[Jeff]

trailer

[Antoine Doinel]

Cool, looks very interesting. Liked the brief shot of the guys on the beach presumably training to shoot. Unfortunately, the title is awkward at best and sounds like a bad translation.

[Via_Chicago]

It looks like the artsy, more boring, and Chinese version of Black Book.

[souvenir]

Link to the poster.

[Barmy]

At least there is no dialogue in this movie.

[Cinesimilitude]

At least there is no dialogue in this movie.

It's Pan's Labyrinth all over again.

[Jeff]

The MPAA has rated the film NC-17 for "some explicit sexuality." Focus features is saying that the studio "accepts the MPAA's NC-17 rating without protest." Good for them. Sure, the NC-17 is the kiss of death in terms of marketing and distribution, but this was never going to be a commercial film anyway. Maybe having an Oscar-winning director helm a film with the rating will help to finally legitimize it.

[Antoine Doinel]

The rating probably doesn't change the fact the film was probably only going to run in the arthouse circuit, which supports NC-17 or "Unrated" films anyway.

[souvenir]

Kudos to Focus. What a ridiculous stigma and hopefully this will be one step towards other studios and moviegoers accepting the rating as something other than the kiss of death. Has there ever been a film rated NC-17 due to excessive violence?

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Has there ever been a film rated NC-17 due to excessive violence?

Off the top of my head, The Last Boy Scout, Kill Bill, Natural Born Killers, High Tension, Saw and even The Wild Bunch were all rated NC-17 or threatened with an NC-17 before recuts (except for The Wild Bunch, where the NC-17 was overturned on appeal).

[Stagger Lee]

I once read that Saving Private Ryan only escaped being rated NC-17 because of Spielberg's influence. Not sure what that's worth.

[souvenir]

Has there ever been a film rated NC-17 due to excessive violence?

Off the top of my head, The Last Boy Scout, Kill Bill, Natural Born Killers, High Tension, Saw and even The Wild Bunch were all rated NC-17 or threatened with an NC-17 before recuts (except for The Wild Bunch, where the NC-17 was overturned on appeal).

Threatened isn't the same though. The studios buckle and the film is edited to get an R. High Tension, an import, seems to have actually received an NC-17, but the others didn't. When NC-17 films are released they almost always contain more nudity than the MPAA can handle, which is a little funny considering most persons in the world will see a naked man and woman head to toe in their lives but not unspeakable torture or exploding heads.

[Cold Bishop]

Has there ever been a film rated NC-17 due to excessive violence?

The situation with violence always seem to be that the violence can easily be trimmed down with little problem, or in rarer situations, such as The Wild Bunch re-release, can be appealed.

I'm sure there are more situations of films getting X ratings due to violence, but by the time the NC-17 came along, a combination of desensitization and "ratings creeping" has pretty much made it a situation where very few films outside of horror films (in which the "unrated" version has become so popular now a days) face it, and when they do, you can refer to the first paragraph to see what happens.

More ridiculous is when LANGUAGE leads to an NC-17 rating. I recall the Martin Lawrence stand-up film He So Crazy (or something like that) was originally stamped with an NC-17, and if I'm not mistaken, it was also the situation with Clerks.

And am I the only person who's going to go see this now ONLY because of the NC-17 rating?

[THX1378]

More ridiculous is when LANGUAGE leads to an NC-17 rating. I recall the Martin Lawrence stand-up film He So Crazy (or something like that) was originally stamped with an NC-17, and if I'm not mistaken, it was also the situation with Clerks.

Miramax hired attorney Alan M. Dershowitz, whom worked on the O.J. Simpson case, to petition the MPAA to lower the NC-17 to an R for Clerks. To this day the only big budget film to ever get an NC-17 and a wide release is still Showgirls. And the last film I can recall that played in theaters with an NC-17 was The Dreamers. I think both Shortbus and Nine Songs were released without a rating.

[flyonthewall2983]

I heard somewhere that Saw IV will be released with the rating.

[Matt]

You can see a list of all the movies released and rated NC-17 (or any other rating) at the MPAA's site:

http://www.mpaa.org/FilmRatings.asp

Click on the pull-down menu next to "Find a rating" and select the rating. The results are limited to 50 in number, but there are only 48 NC-17 films listed. A Dirty Shame was probably the last high-profile film with the rating, but it only played 133 theaters.

You can see a list of films with the rating or originally given the rating before being cut at Wikipedia, but being Wikipedia it may not be complete.

[malcolm1980]

Call me an optimist but I think the NC-17 on Lust, Caution may be good on the long run. I think if anyone could break the NC-17 curse, it would be an Academy-Award winning director with a couple of international hits under his belt and Ang Lee is one of those.

[Lemdog]

Does anybody know where I can find a list of theaters, where this is showing?

[Dylan]

I believe it only opened in one theatre today (I'm guessing LA or NY), and will expand to the larger cities next week.

[In Heaven]

Has there ever been a film rated NC-17 due to excessive violence?

Off the top of my head, The Last Boy Scout, Kill Bill, Natural Born Killers, High Tension, Saw and even The Wild Bunch were all rated NC-17 or threatened with an NC-17 before recuts (except for The Wild Bunch, where the NC-17 was overturned on appeal).

So was Santa Sangre. I think (this is according to AJ himself tho, so who knows) it was the first NC-17 movie for violence. (as opposed to X.)

[TedW]

The movie is extraordinary. Extremely well-made. Tony Leung and the newcomer are both excellent. I would definitely recommend checking it out if you can.

[Cold Bishop]

The movie is extraordinary. Extremely well-made. Tony Leung and the newcomer are both excellent. I would definitely recommend checking it out if you can.

I don't know... I'm still not sure what to make of it, but I don't its successful. Its probably the best Ang Lee I've seen, but it still didn't come together me.

Some people have made the Black Book connection, and its interesting that I got around to Verhoeven's film two days before seeing this, because they both seem to suffer from the same problem, namely, there seems to be two films at work in both of them; one much more interesting than the other, they don't seem to entirely merge them into one perfect entity, and unfortunately, they spend more time with the least satisfying one. Both of them share the same first film, that is the espionage thriller, which I think is the least interesting aspect of both films, have been done better in, among other things Army of Shadows, which to me is the king of all WWII spy/espionage/resistance/what-have-you films, and both of which don't do anything with it that hasn't been done before.

In Black Book's case, the second film seemed to be a look at Post-war Netherlands, and the confusion that followed, with accusations being thrown everywhich way, and questions of responsibility and guilt for the war being raised.

In Lust, Caution the second film seems to be the psychological study of Leung and Tang, which manifests itself in their sexual relationship.

But while I'm less bothered by the fault in Black Book, since I feel like it was necessary to have the resistance thriller in order to capture the impact of Post-war Netherlands the way it did, and my main problem was that I wished Verhoeven would have spent more time on the Post-war half of the film and taken it farther, and would have done something more original with the first half.

Lust on the other hand, I feel doesn't come close to doing the the psychological drama it tries for any justice. Tony Leung really carries this part of the film, expressing an amount of spiritual pain and torment which definitely isn't in the narrative, and we can all agree he is great in it. But the film really doesn't do much else with this side of the film; they meet, they fuck- often violently, they fall in love, and, without giving away to much of a spoiler, it ends. There is no real examination, meditation, or confrontation of the spiritual and psychological aspect of this relationship, other than that which the actors bring. There's a great film buried in here somewhere; my problem is that that film seems to be Last Tango In Paris (which Ang Lee definitely alludes to). And while Leung does a great job of expressing the incomprehensible and seemingly bottomless pain of his character not unlike Brando, Lee doesn't create a movie like Bertolucci's in which the the film seems to work directly through the lead (or leads) and his performance the way Last Tango is really Brando's show. This wouldn't be a problem if Lee's narrative communicated anything worthwhile about these characters, but it doesn't. What we have is a film that has occasional flashes of brilliance, usually in Leung's performance, or in Lee's direction whenever the two leads are the main focus, and not the espionage plot, but Lee spends to much damn time making a resistance thriller instead of fully exploring where the real action is.

The thing I still haven't decided is, while the film has occasional flashes of a great film, whether the film its buried within is good enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. Maybe it is, maybe it ain't. I still haven't fully formed an opinion on the film and I would love to hear what you liked about. It is extraordinary well-made on a technical level, and Tony Leung continues to prove he's one of the absolute best actors today with as few words as possible, but if all I'm gonna get is a tired and somewhat-cliche resistance film with bits-and-pieces of something interesting, I'd much rather stay home and watch Army of Shadows and Last Tango In Paris back to back.

EDIT: I still want to mention the beautiful Tang Wei, who does an amazing job for a first time actress even if she isn't quite as accomplished as Tony Leung in being able to pull stuff out of the air that isn't in Lee's narrative, which is to me why she doesn't have the same resonance to me when discussing the psycho-sexual romance part of the film. As far as the rest of the film goes, and of which she is the lead, she is great.

[TedW]

Yeah, I gotta respond to that, but I can't do it now. I'll jump into this as soon as possible.

[LeeB.Sims]

Has there ever been a film rated NC-17 due to excessive violence?

How Running Scared, one of my favorite films of the past five years, dodged an NC-17 rating is beyond me.

[kieslowski_67]

This is probably my favorite Ang film to date. However, I am afraid that you probably have to understand the Chinese culture and the writer to fully appreciate this film.