If I had a word for the films of Ang Lee, it wouldn’t be masterful, genius, poetic, or transcendent. It would be competent. That’s a compliment - most films and filmmakers fail at even that meager task. But with few exceptions (Brokeback Mountain comes to mind), Lee’s work is just competent, above average, solid.

Lust, Caution, then, is a return to form for Lee. It’s pretty solid, and for just over an hour fairly gripping. From a purely mechanical standpoint, it is, like many of Lee’s films, overlong in its second act and its emotional weight unduly balanced toward one main character (even Brokeback, which I admittedly admire quite a bit, succeeds because of Ledger and not Gyllenhaal). Its sex scenes are, yes, graphic, and it probably does deserve that NC-17, though I’ll admit I didn’t quite understand the necessity of the rawness of the sex, which verges in at least one scene on softcore territory. We get it. Sexual power = emotional power = political power. But do we really need to see Tony Leung’s ballsack in order to get that point across?

Much more interesting is the film’s emphasis on theater and performance (of gender, of politics) in a time of war. The film plays greatly with this time-honored convention, offering a veritable matryoshka of performances to open up. It concerns an actress (Tang Wei) and her covert life trying to seduce and entrap a vicious collaborator during the Japanese occupation of China in World War 2. Her experience? She’s the lead actress in a patriotic theater troupe - one scene from a nationalistic melodrama is among the film’s best, adeptly exploring the manner in which on-stage performance translates into political performance, as Tang’s (character’s) empassioned cries for Chinese sovereignty are echoed by her audience. It’s a unique moment for Lee to step back and explore the mechanics of melodrama, and indeed the way his films impact the audience. That his tactics are more subtle, his audience more sophisticated does not mitigate the self-awareness of this move. Even more self-aware is his enclosure of other texts into the film - at one point early in the seduction, Tang’s Chia Chi (in character as Tai Tai) talks about how much she loves going to the movies, and how it helps her to escape her boring, business-minded husband, echoing the plot of the classic melodrama she watched earlier in the film, David Lean’s Brief Encounter. That Leung’s Yee immediately disregards the idea, mentioning how he doesn’t like sitting in the dark reveals the gulf between the emotional language of film and the failure of the romantic ideal.

(That Lust, Caution is indeed also a film, not real life, and very much plays into a lot of the melodramatic tropes found in a film like Brief Encounter is not to be overlooked.)

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