Lust, Caution

I caught Lust, Caution today with fidgety Art (it was nice of him lah, to come watch with me despite his limited interest), and I thought the show was really good, with the understated yet dramatic unfolding and conclusion of the relationship between the main characters. With my 'morbid' nature, in the words of my good friend Bread Pit, I am a sucker for tragic romances in the likes of Wuthering Heights: It intensifies, fires and explodes into nothingness, or worse, fizzles into a big nothing. Sometimes I guiltily catch myself orchestrating my own tragic romance, if it hasn't already caught me unaware, and strangely enough or not, God is always in the middle of it.

Lust, Caution features Tong Leung as an anti-hero character, and there's nothing he plays better than that. Goodness, he was good. As a female audience, I felt like how the female lead felt: a mixture of sympathy and revulsion, obsession and hate for this man who hides his emotions beneath soulful eyes, and yet, everyday, order the execution and torture of many people.The sensual tension kept me at the edge of my seat (*note: gentle snoring emanating from someone beside me*).

My favourite scene was that which displayed the first time Mr Yee and Wang Jiazhi had an extended session with each other at the restaurant. It was charged with silence and probing, seductive looks from both sides. It was the first time the audience had a close up of the both of them. He was attractive but not handsome. She was conventionally pretty.

In their conduct with each other throughout the whole show, you can never tell (or at least I couldn't) if he suspected her, or how he truly felt towards her. Mr Yee himself was surreal, being so used to masking himself and displaying little or no emotion due to his 'delicate' and perverse job, and, yes, the only real thing about him was the sex, and the raw energy he displayed while at it, despite his eyes still being elusive. That was why I thought the sexual scenes were central-they define most of the charged relationship between the two; both of them, in that elevated and safe enclave, were only real then, in the midst of being caught up in the deadly espionage.

Their relationship reminds me of Elton John's 'original sin': the intensive and doomed first love that the unfortunate and melancholic amongst us have gone through.

From Original Sin

.........

I can't eat, can't sleep

Still I hunger for you when you look at me

That face, those eyes

All the sinful pleasures deep inside

Tell me how, you know now, the ways and means of getting in Underneath my skin,

Oh you were always my original sin

And tell me why, I shudder inside, every time we begin

This dangerous game

Oh you were always my original sin

........