Hacker Cinema
Lust, Caution
色‧戒
2007 · Film · 158 min
Directed by Ang Lee
During World War II, a secret agent must seduce, then assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai. Her mission becomes clouded when she finds herself falling in love with the man she is assigned to kill.
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4 comments on Hacker News
My wife grew up in the PRC. Before Communism they were a very prominent family (her great uncle was a literary pioneer; his brother, her grandpa, a judge prominent enough that he was mentioned in the movie Lust Caution; and their brother a successful MD), and as a result were "black" under the Communist regime.
With the exception of my wife's grandmother, every member of her extended family spent time in either prison or forced-work camps. One of her aunts translated for me the "confession" she was forced to sign. None of this was related to what we'd consider crimes, but was entirely political.
The Communists took the family's house. They had a refrigerator and a piano, which the Red Guard destroyed on the basis that if everyone didn't have such bourgeois goods, then no one should. When TVs were made available for neighborhood viewing, my wife wasn't allowed to attend.
And there's the malnutrition and squalor they were subjected to. They shared one floor of a brownstone with 2 other families - so, 3 entire families sharing one kitchen and 1.5 baths. There was insufficient food, to the point where they had to eat insect-infested grain - while Party members got plenty.
So, all in all, my wife's experience with Communism wasn't positive, and having lived through that, she's the first to speak up against anything that exhibits any of those traits.
I still remember how the female lead in Ang Lee’s 2007 “Lust, Caution”, was blacklisted (the film itself was banned from mainland China). Though Googling her just now out of curiousity, it looks like she’s been able to make a comeback:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-tang-wei-china-20170825-story.html
> MUBI has spent years cultivating that audience with a selection of artsy, obscure films that don't usually appear on Netflix or Hulu. (It originally launched under the name "The Auteurs," before rebranding in 2010 as MUBI — a play on accented pronunciations of "movie," and after a city in Nigeria.) On Monday, the titles available on the company's US site included Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 classic The Conformist, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, by Chan-wook Park. Occasionally, it features more mainstream movies like Sin City, currently available on the French site, though the majority are far more obscure. A new title is added every day as another drops out, meaning that only 30 films are available for streaming at any given time.
In defense of Netflix (not that the "Goliath" in this comparison needs defenders)...but "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" has been available on streaming Netflix for, as far as I remember, the time that I've been a customer, which was basically when streaming started. "Mr. Vengeance" is the first in "The Vengeance Trilogy" that includes the more well-known "Oldboy" [1] and "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance"...I think the entire trilogy has been on Netflix for years (including the regrettable American remake of Oldboy, but can't fault Netflix for having it...)
Even as Netflix's blockbuster selection has faded (with the ending of the Starz deal, and in comparison to HBONow)...I've never had a complaint about their selection of the most well-known and recent foreign indies. "Let the Right One In", "The Hunt", "Force Majeure", The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy...though sure, they could always have more (and obviously, I don't know enough of the foreign scene to know all of the gems that they don't have).
But I imagine the problem for Netflix isn't that they do a shitty job of curation...but that the deals end up not being financially valuable to them, as it was in the Starz case. Ang Lee's movies ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Lust, Caution") were long-time selections, but I've just noticed they are no longer available for streaming.
edit: if you liked Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is definitely worth checking out. But whereas Oldboy was entertaining on top of being emotionally extreme...I'd argue "Mr. Vengeance" is much more of an artistic achievement, but at the cost of being "entertaining". In fact, I get a little ill at the thought of re-watching it, even though I own it on DVD.
[1] http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oldboy-2005 -- Ebert's review here is so glowing that not only did it get me to seek out Oldboy, but it changed the way I think of foreign movies in comparison to Hollywood.
Hey, I have found another youtube Chinese movie with subtitle. You probably have heard of this movie. It is Lust Caution, a very very famous movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQgpbC4hvHg