Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy: Oscar Winner Ang Lee Goes Full NC-17 with 'Lust, Caution'

<< Blog | Editorial Features Tuesday, December 3, 4:00 PMTue, 3 Dec 2019 @ 4:00 PM by Thrustin' Hoffman

In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, Ang Lee goes from winning an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain to experimenting with the NC-17 rating with Lust, Caution.

Undoubtedly one of the most versatile and chameleonic directors of all-time, Ang Lee has built his entire career around being impossible to pin down. Winner of two Best Director Oscars, Lee's career has seen him directing period costume dramas, romantic comedies, introspective dramas, and even a comic book movie back before directing a comic book movie was considered cool. Basically the only consistent thing among his filmography is how varied and inconsistent his films have been, although there is at least one major unifying thread to Lee's early work.

Whether it's The Wedding Banquet, Sense Sensibility, Hulk, Brokeback Mountain, or Lust, Caution, Lee loves exploring the notion of a protagonist harboring a secret inner life that is radically different from the one they present to the world. The conflict in these films is often built around the character's suppression of whatever that may be—from homosexuality to a literal green rage monster—and the fear inspired by the threat of said secret being revealed. This may be a result of his being born and raised in Taiwan, then coming to America in the late 70s to pursue his film education, thus creating an internal war between East and West within his own life.

This is purely speculative, but I feel it is one of the main reasons his films are so successfully executed. His Eastern upbringing instilled in him a discipline and pride in his work that is evident in everything he does, but his Western education opened him up to a broader variety of subjects and a more progressive worldview. Working on fellow Tisch student Spike Lee's student film "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads" had to have been an eye-opening experience for someone who had only been in America for four years at that point.

It is this rigorous discipline for the art of filmmaking that made Ang Lee such a well-regarded and respected director, not to mention his willingness to embrace topics that might be considered verboten in Taiwan or China. By the time he got to 2007's Lust, Caution, he already had a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as well as a Best Director trophy for Brokeback. He had the proverbial blank check for his follow-up to that film and chose to put his meticulous style to work on something more erotic than he had attempted before.

While Lee had dabbled with sexas a theme in 1997's The Ice Storm, he kept the actual act of sex off screen, something he had no intention of doing with Lust, Caution. The film tells the story of an ambitiousShanghai-born student named Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang) who travels to Hong Kong to attend university in the late 1930s. Here she becomes involved in a theatre troupe thatmoves from merely critiquing Japanese intervention in China to wanting to actively make an act of war against Japan. Chia Chi is convinced by her fellow students to become romantically involved with Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a key figure in Japan's puppet regime currently ruling China, hoping that she will seduce him so that they can destroy him.

The film's languorous pace betrays its reputation and certainly its NC-17 rating, which would seem to suggest the film is an all-out bacchanalia. The virginal Chia Chi is more or less out of her element in the film's first half, too naïve sexually to adequately seduce a man of such voracious sexual appetites as Mr. Yee. When the troupe fails to assassinate Yee on their first attempt, Yee and his wife (Joan Chen) leave Hong Kong and return to Shanghai, where the story picks up again three years later.When we meet Chia Chi again, she is a more sexually liberated woman than the one we encountered in the first half, as demonstrated by her sleeping in the nude and walking over to the window in the morning to fling open the curtains...

Her old target, Mr. Yee, is now the head of the secret police in Shanghai and the old troupe is hoping to re-enlist Chia Chi in her mission to seduce Yee, something she is much more successful at achieving this time around. Their first sexual encounter, however, is rough. Rougher even than Chia Chi had convinced herself it might be, which causes her some consternation around carrying out this mission...

As time goes on, however, their relationship becomes more passionatebut no less intense.The film's three sex scenesbetween them all come within a thirty minute span between the 90 and 120 minute marks, making it much easier for the audience to chart their progression from aggressive to sensual. Lee spent close to 100 hours staging and shooting these three sex scenes that occupy roughly ten minutes of screen time, but that just goes to show how crucial he finds them to the plot. Of course, it's also encouraging to see a director leaving no room for error in these sort of scenes, choreographing them down to most minute detail and ensuring that nothing untoward could happen between his performers.

The proof is in the pudding as these scenes look very convincing in terms of the audience believing that these two people are really having sex...

The scenes also got the film slapped with the restrictive NC-17 rating here in the US, with Lee refusing to cut any of the scenes in order to achieve an infinitely more marketable R-rating. The film was similarly released uncut in both Lee's native Taiwan as well as Hong Kong, but for the film to be released in mainland China, Lee acquiesced. He eventually trimmed the film's sex scenes, as well as altering some of the film's dialogue so as to not vilify any decisions made by the Chinese characters in the film.

Perhaps the biggest fallout from the film was suffered by lead actress Wei Tang, whose participation in such explicit sex scenes got hereffectively blacklisted from the Chinese film industry for three years. She is reported to have gone to the UK during this time to further her studies, but it was a pretty major blow to her career coming as it did immediately following her screen debut. Tony Leung, on the other hand, got no such restrictions placed on his career, but this is likely due to most of his work being done in Hong Kong, which resides outside of any restrictions placed on actors within mainland China.

Thankfully her career bounced back and she didn't suffer any lasting impact from the ban. It is, however, a healthy reminder that for as puritanical and restrictive as our ratings system can seem to be in this country, audiences in other parts of the world have it a lot worse than we do. It's a fairly scathing indictment of censorship laws whenan Oscar winner like Ang Lee can't even get his uncut vision into a theater in China.

Catch up with our other editions of Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy...

—The "Real Sex" ofDon't Look Now

—Scarlett Johansson's Nude Debut inUnder the Skin

—The 2 Very Different Sex ScenesofBasic Instinct

—How Halle Berry's Nude Debut Led Her toMonster's Ball

—HowMulholland Dr.'s Legendary Lesbian Scenes Deepen the Film's Mystery

—Showgirlsand the Dangers of High Camp

—Rosario Dawson Laid Bare for Danny Boyle'sTrance

—Katie Holmes MakesThe GiftWorth Remembering

—Jennifer Connelly Comes of Age inThe Hot Spot

—Lisa Bonet's Bloody Nude Debut inAngel Heart

—Monica Bellucci Gets Brutalized in Gaspar Noé'sIrréversible