Ozu's Presence in Lust Caution
May 7, 2008
Lust Caution seems more familiar than it really is. The time is World War II and we are in an occupied country. The resistance battles the collaborators. But we are not in Paris or anywhere else in Europe.. we're in Shanghai and the occupiers are Japanese. Ang Lee introduces a different part of the world into our cinematic vision.. and demonstrates how beautiful the results can be.
Toward the end of Lust Caution the collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) has his mistress and secret member of resistance (Tang Wei) brought to the base of the Japanese occupiers. The mistress has to walk through a complex filled with private rooms entered by sliding doors. I am not sure what to call this kind of entertainment complex, but it brings to mind similar scenes in the films of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. This is exactly the environment in which Ozu brings his characters together for social occasions.. especially his groups of men. Now this typical Ozu scene takes on scary overtones: the soldiers are drunk and the theatrical painted singers look and sound hollow. It has a nightmarish quality.
The collaborator and his mistress finally sit alone in the traditional Japanese setting. Although it is the type of scene that we know from Ozu, it is now occupied by two internally conflicted Chinese. The temptation to switch into an Ozu-like visual style is rejected by Ang Lee as he keeps the camera moving and avoids internally framed scenes.
The collaborator (responsible for the torture and killing of Chinese rebels) describes the scene:
They sing like they're crying. Like dogs howling for their dead masters. These Japanese devils kill people like flies, but deep down they're scared as hell. All our days are numbered since the Americans entered the war, yet here we are with our painted faces, listening to their off-tune songs.
The ideas of "Japanese devils" and "off-tune songs" puts a whole new interpretive frame on this traditional scene.. making us think back to those still and quiet Ozu scenes, and wonder if we did not miss something. In this setting the collaborator and his mistress feel most unified. Among a foreign people both must hide themselves. Both are now genuinely closer to each other than to those around them.
It is at this point, as these two Chinese lovers are settled within a quintessentially Japanese setting, that the mistress sings a beautiful and traditional Chinese song. The message seems clear: Ang Lee is colonizing the setting for his own version of international film. It is a style that will be at the same time more historically skeptical and emotionally searing. This will not be allowed to turn into an homage to the master craftsmanship of Ozu.. in the way that a film like Yi Yi by Edward Yang is. It is an appropriation of a setting but with the application of a modern cinematic style that takes control of the space as masterfully as the traditional song in the midst of those off-tune songs.
