Lust, Caution

In occupied China during World War II, a group of students plot to assassinate a collaborator with the Japanese (Tony Leung) by having a teenage girl (Tang Wei) disguise herself as a merchant’s wife to seduce him. Director Ang Lee and writers James Schamus and Wang Hui Ling (adapting a short story by Eileen Chang) paint a seamless picture of China in the 1930s and ’40s—even the smallest details look exactly right—and punctuate their long (158 min.) film with some startlingly explicit sexual scenes between Leung and Tang (doubly so because of the characters’ formal reserve the rest of the time). The movie seems more an experiment in atmosphere than an exploration of character, and leaves us with a feeling of desolate futility, but Lee imparts a sense of roiling depths beneath a placid surface.