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Recently Quentin Tarantino told London's Daily Telegraph he wanted to make a sex movie. "It's got to be kind of kinky, because that's what's cinematic," he said, though to fully get the gist, you have to imagine him tilting his head and stabbing the air with his right hand when he says it. The surprising thing about his statement wasn't that he was drawn to the erotic — he did construct an entire narrative around a gimp suit — but that he hadn't made such a film already. All that violence and visual hyperbole and shock (people slicing off each other's ears, syringes dangling from the chest, casual beheadings) and so little sex. The same could be said of some of America 's best auteurs: Spielberg, Coppola, Eastwood, Scorsese, even newcomers

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like Wes Anderson. (One notable exception is Kubrick and, well, we know how that turned out.) For all the scads of screen time given to the old bump 'n' grind, our best directors often shy away from it.

Not Ang Lee. His film Lust, Caution has received the scarlet NC-17 rating, making him the highest-profile director to get the rating since it was instituted in 1990 for Philip Kaufman's Henry & June. (Kaufman is another American director unafraid of sex. See Quills and The Unbearable Lightness of Being for further proof.) Since his early days as a filmmaker, Lee has been exploring themes of sexual orientation and desire. His acclaimed second film, The Wedding Banquet, was about a gay man forced into a marriage of convenience. Eat Drink Man Woman mined similar territory, this time from the perspective of a lusty Asian businesswoman pinned in by tradition and family. Anyone who cringed through the devastating front-seat adultery of The Ice Storm knows that Lee's eye for painful sexual detail didn't begin with Brokeback Mountain. For more than a decade, Lee has been quietly building an impressive canon about the erotic experience.

Sex isn't really the throughline of Ang Lee's films; after all, he did direct Sense & Sensibility. Instead, his running theme is the conflict between what a person wants and what society deems acceptable. The struggle echoes his own, as the son of a Taiwanese professor who disappointed his parents by pursuing art instead of academia. But sex turns out to be a wonderful cinematic device to explore the tension between what's expected and what's longed for (the tension between, you'll excuse me, lust and caution). I suspect Ang Lee isn't all that interested in kink — I don't think he would construct a narrative around a gimp suit, for instance — but he has a deep understanding of the way our bodies both speak the truth and betray us. The first sex scene between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain isn't tender; it's a wrestling match. I was underwhelmed by Brokeback, with its ambling pace and weepy monologues. But I find those first thirty minutes interesting: how their romance transpires through little but glances, touches, fists on bone. The Ice Storm, one of my favorite Lee films, is a smorgasbord of cringe-inducing sex. Bad sex, too-early sex, too-little-too-late sex. At one point, a fourteen-year-old girl (played by an amazing Christina Ricci) and an even younger boy get naked and climb in bed together. In the end, all they do is cuddle. The characters try to be so blasé about the catastrophes around them — the affairs and the political corruption and the loneliness — but what they really seem to yearn for is family, some kind of spiritual center. Lee's best film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, isn't about sex, but boy, is it erotic. All those women warriors soaring across the sky? Yowzah. It's hard to imagine Lee didn't have sex on the brain when he filmed that exhilarating treetop sequence — Chow Yun-Fat and Zhang Ziyi pursuing each other breathlessly through the bamboo forest, leaping from limb to swaying limb, eyes locked, legs scissoring wildly. As far as visual metaphors for the old in-out, it sure beats the train entering the tunnel.

Lust, Caution is a different kind of film. (Lee has proven himself a master of many genres — except, sadly, the comic-book blockbuster, as anyone who sat through The Hulk could attest.) Based on the short story by Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution is a historical espionage set during World War II and scripted entirely in Mandarin. It's the story of Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), a sumptuously beautiful, idealistic actress in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. She becomes involved in a student-led plot to kill a top Japanese official, Mr. Yee (played by Tony Leung, a dashing Chinese matinee idol who has darkened himself considerably here). To trap Mr. Yee, she must seduce him. A psycho-sexual drama unfolds in violent and startling ways. In their first sexual encounter, he rips her dress, throws her to the bed, fucks her from behind, hand seizing her throat. Much later, she nearly smothers him with a pillow. In between, their bodies tangle in dazzling ways. As Lee told New York magazine, "If you had just put them in a missionary position, the scenes could be more comfortable, more sexy, but the contortion of their bodies visually represents what they inflict on each other." Like Liliana Cavani's Night Porter, and perhaps like Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (both depict affairs between Nazi officers and their victims), the sadomasochistic relationship between Wong Chia Chi and Mr. Yee speaks to the desperation of the era and the violence of occupation. Is the sex graphic? Yes, I suppose. There's a lot of naked groping. If you're making a list of exposed body parts (and we assume that pays the bills for someone), then perhaps it's graphic. But the most shocking scene involves a gruesome, blood-soaked murder. It's much more scarring than someone's erect nipple.

It's rare that a studio, even one as modest as Focus Films, has the courage to release an NC-17 film, especially from such a prestige director. When you consider all the bullshit you must endure — the lack of distribution, or the problems with advertisers — it is just simpler to snip the offending five seconds. Even Kubrick caved on this issue. (Remember those silly obstructions during the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut?) So it's a little surprising, even confusing, that nobody did it here. A round of applause, please, for Ang Lee and his longtime collaborator James Schamus (also the president of Focus Films). Though it makes me wonder, perhaps cynically, if the rating isn't a stunt to drum up attention for a movie that is, basically, a three-hour foreign period piece. Regardless Lust, Caution is the best NC-17 movie I've ever seen. As much as I've wanted to champion NC-17 films over the years, they've often left me cold. Even Henry & June should really just be viewed for the naughty bits. Lust, Caution, on the other hand, is an unsettling and transfixing drama. When the credits rolled, two hours and 40 minutes later, I had no idea how much time had passed. Back when I swooned for Sense & Sensibility, I never thought Ang Lee would be the erotic director to make me reconsider my opinion about NC-17 films. I did, however, suspect it would never be Quentin Tarantino.

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©2007 Sarah Hepola & Nerve.com


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