Houston Community News >> Ang Lee Lust Caution Movie

8/30/2007 Venice (AFP) - Taiwan's Ang Lee, victorious in Venice two years ago with Brokeback Mountain, was back on Thursday, this time with erotic spy thriller Se, Jie (Lust, Caution) as the world's oldest film festival hotted up. The tense drama stars novice actress Tang Wei as a resistance spy who slowly, creepily, lets her target, a powerful political figure played by Tony Leung, 'worm his way into her heart'.

Based on a short story by popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang and set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the 1940s, the film's many sex scenes are as explicit as they are emotionally ambiguous.

'Sex in my film? It's just the search for oneself. What I wanted to show was none other than ambiguity,' said Lee, whose Brokeback Mountain also garnered the best director award at last year's Oscars.

Also screened on Thursday was British director Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth starring Michael Caine and Jude Law, with a crisp screenplay by English playwright and Nobel literature laureate Harold Pinter.

Festival director Marco Mueller has said that a 23rd 'surprise film' to be screened next week will be from an Asian country by an Asian master, specifying only that it is a country other than China, South Korea or Japan.

Contributed by AFP