Ang Lee doesn't need graphic sex scenes to make his work exciting. Yet those are the scenes in his new movie, Lust, Caution, that have tongues wagging . . . and it's starting to annoy him. The long-time US resident talks Oscar chances with Donald Clarke
EVER since Ang Lee's Lust, Cautionwon the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, idle journalists have wasted surprising amounts of the director's time with the most wearisome of questions. This strangely unhurried thriller, a tale of espionage in wartime China, features some eye-wateringly explicit sex scenes between Tony Leung and newcomer Tang Wei. These sequences - trimmed in the Chinese and Malaysian versions by a grudging Lee - have led to the picture being saddled with a financially ruinous NC-17 cert in the United States and have ignited the imaginations of too many slow-witted hacks. Everywhere he has gone, Lee has been asked whether the actors are actually doing it.
No surprises there, you might say. After three decades, poor old Nic Roeg still has to endure suggestions that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were really bonking in Don't Look Now. What's interesting is Lee's reaction.
Rather than sighing despairingly and explaining the difference between movies and real life, the director cheekily asks the reporters what their own view is. He hums and haws his way around the question with a curious detachment.
What gives? We know darn well that Leung and Wei are faking it. They're actors, after all. Why won't Ang knock this story on the head? "I like to keep a mystery," he says. "It's not that I am playing a game. But there's an illusion you want to maintain. Once someone breaks the brim of that illusion, they are taken out of the movie. So, it's hard to tell the truth. That's why I am reluctant to admit one way or another. If it looks real and the actors believe it then they might as well be having sex. Isn't that so?" Ang Lee has always been infuriatingly obtuse while discussing his movies.
Whether pondering his fights with the studio during the making of Hulkor his run-ins with the religious right after the release of Brokeback Mountain, the quietly-spoken Taiwanese director, now 53, will potter about the issue without delivering any definitive judgements.
This is just the way he is. But it remains an effective strategy for deflecting the many controversies Lust, Cautionhas scared up. Based on a short story by Eileen Chang, a Chinese writer of some renown, the lengthy film details the efforts of a group of student radicals to infiltrate collaborators in Shanghai and Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. The embarrassments of the 1930s and 1940s remain a tricky subject in China and Taiwan.
"Oh, this is a void in our history," he says. "During the second World War, neither side [the Japanese nor the resistance] was actually . The nationalist part of the country denies that disgrace even now. Eileen Chang belongs to that era. You just don't see anything about the occupation or the resistance. I haven't seen it done before there."
The discomfort about discussing the era is, perhaps, similar to that experienced by the French in the aftermath of that country's occupation.
"Oh it is much worse than you found in France," he says. "And the Chinese don't care about history. When they make a new city now, they just destroy everything to make way for it. But it was important to make the film. If I hadn't made this film then that history might have disappeared. In 15 more years all those who remember it will have died out. We could still take somebody who lived through it to the set and ask: what's wrong with this?"
Tang Wei's character, Wang Jingwei, a student radical, is persuaded by her comrades to become the mistress of a high-ranking official in the collaborationist administration. It takes a good 90 minutes for Tang Wei and Leung to get sweaty, but when the clothes do eventually come off, the film makes few concessions to the prudish. Only a buffoon would deduce that the actors were really having sex, but this remains by far the most explicit film Lee has yet made.
To this point, the director's slew of cinematic triumphs - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Sense and Sensibility, Brokeback Mountain- have had more to do with the sublimation of sexual urges than their consummation. Poor old Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger spent much more time staring miserably at mountains than frolicking in their tent.
"I took a hint from the short story," he says. "It is quite explicit in there. I also had an ambition as a film-maker to discover what's going on with sexual relations. This is a movie about the ultimate performance."
The sex scenes were, apparently, among the first to be shot. As Lee explains it, he wanted to get them out of the way early on, so he would have some idea how they might shade the rest of the drama.
"Each of the sex scenes has a different colour to it," he says. "One is about revolution. Another is about revelation. It was crucial to shoot those early on, because then I knew how to anchor them."
It must have been difficult to create a relaxed atmosphere on the set.
"In a way. None of us are professionals at shooting sex scenes," he says. "We are not hardcore film-makers. We try to be technically as professional as anybody else. But as human beings it's tricky. There were only six of us on set. You set things up with stand-ins for the actors and then get everybody who's not needed off the set."
Ang has said that he sees both Tang Wei and the character she plays as his spokespeople in the film. Like the young actor and the fictional student, he felt he was saved when, as a young man, he discovered the theatre. That must have made shooting those sex scenes all the more peculiar.
"I see myself in her, but I also see myself in Tony's shoes. She is my spokesperson, so, yes, the sexual part confused me. When I do a sex scene I feel both in her and in him. So, that is mind-boggling."
In truth, the sex scenes, though long and raunchy, will not disturb any veteran who has endured the buttery thrusts of Last Tango in Paris. There are, however, some very worrying aspects to the gender dynamics of the story. Leung's character, Mr Yee, brutalises Wang Jingwei in their first encounter and goes on to treat her with withering contempt. Nonetheless, the young resistance fighter, who initially plans to assassinate her lover, appears to enjoy the rough sexual encounters and may even develop an affection for the tyrant. That first coupling is not quite as queasily inappropriate as the rape scene in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, but the woman's apparent acquiescence to sexual violence remains troubling.
"That's a very hard question," he says, before not quite answering it. "There has been no unanimous feeling. But women seem to enjoy the movie more than men. I think I am being true to a woman writer and also to Hui-Ling Wang, our woman screenwriter. Many female viewers have different tastes. They just don't just see a man raping a woman in that first scene. They see something entirely different."
As ever, Ang Lee doesn't go out of his way to justify his creative choices. Instead, he sets off on a tour about neighbouring issues and related themes.
"Look, when distribution companies want to hear what people say after a screening they go to the women's room and the men's room. After Lust, Cautionthe men's room was silent, but the women's room was very noisy indeed. They were all shouting about the film."
Sadly, the controversy has not helped fuel interest in the film at the US box office. Though the picture has attracted raves in Asia and won that big award in Venice, it received mixed reviews in the US and has so far failed to rustle up major audiences in English-language territories.
Still, no sane person could doubt that Lee, who has lived in the United States for nearly 30 years, remains one of the most exciting film directors in the world today. Since the release in 1993 of The Wedding Banquet, his second feature, he has fashioned a unique cinematic oeuvre, unequalled in its diversity and distinction. Even Hulk, his least lauded picture, offers singular pleasures to the patient viewer. However, he didn't get his hands on an Oscar until 2005. His pride at securing the best director award for Brokeback Mountain, the gay shepherd masterpiece, must, surely have been tempered by disappointment that Crash, a markedly inferior film, somehow won best picture.
"Yes, well it was disappointing. Not so much for me. Not even for the rest of the crew. But for the issue the film adressed. This is a populist award and it would have helped draw attention."
So what went wrong? "Well, we had been picking up awards since the Venice film festival and I think we ran out of steam at the last moment. We missed the last kick. When I am promoting a film, I am like a racehorse. They tell me where to run and I do. Sometimes answering questions is a drag, but sometimes it is pleasant. It is pleasant talking to you."
It's very kind of him to say as much. So let's put an end to the speculation about the actors having actual rumpy-pumpy. He laughs.
"Well. Look it took two weeks to shoot those scenes. Nobody can have sex for two weeks."
