"Se, Jie" takes top honors

[cinemabon]

Will this be the next "Midnight Cowboy" the only X-rated film to make best picture?

I wonder if someone could ask me how many NC-17 films have taken the Golden Lion at Venice. I could not find one... but perhaps I missed one.

In case you haven't heard, Ang Lee took top prize at the Venice Film Festival for "Se, Jie" a WWII story of spies and sexual intrigue (Lee hinting the sex may have been real on the set), which if anyone had a lick of sense would know that violates equity rules. Evidently the press and critics booed Lee when they announced the winner.

Ebert reviewed the film last week in Toronto.

Any thoughts?

[cinemabon]

September 7, 2007

"Se, Jie" review

By Roger Ebert

TORONTO -- If there was ever a director who seems in no danger of repeating himself, that director is Ang Lee. None of his films bears the slightest similarity in subject or tone to any of the others. No doubt there is a subterranean link joining them, but it would take a journey to the center of the earth to find it. And he would be your man to film the journey.

Consider his latest and not even most controversial film, "Lust, Caution," which was a special presentation of the Toronto Film Festival here Friday night. Set in Shanghai during the years of the Japanese occupation of China, it is about politics, students, assassination, Mah-Jongg and a great deal of sex. It is also long, languid and exquisitely beautiful, its camera wandering the world of a privileged class of Chinese who collaborate with the Japanese and profit hugely from the black market.

Let's start with the sex. No, let's start with the Mah-Jongg. Joan Chen plays the spoiled wife of the secret service boss Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, the Asian Cary Grant). She and her friends complain that their lives are limited to Mah-Jongg and shopping; their conversations around the game table include diamonds, nylons and cigarettes and other black-market bargains.

Into their circle comes Mrs. Mak (Tang Wei), allegedly the wife of a rich merchant, in fact a member of a student revolutionary group that has decided to murder a collaborationist as their summer project. Her assignment: Seduce Mr. Yee and set him up for killing. During a relationship that spans two years, they grow so intimate and passionate that, she observes, for him there is no satisfaction without some blood involved. She doesn't enjoy their sex, exactly, so much as marvel at the intimacy it brings despite her hatred for the man.

The sex scenes are not, as had been rumored, hard core. But they make use of positions also employed in Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," The Kama Sutra, and, I believe, chiropractic treatment. They show the characters being drawn almost against their will into fearsome intimacy.

Ang Lee's other films have included "Eat Drink Man Woman," "The Ice Storm," "Sense and Sensibility," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "The Hulk," and find if you will the connecting link.

[oscar jubis]

You're right in that no film rated X or NC-17 in the US has won the top prize at Venice.
Lust, Caution opens in the US on September 27th.
Variety says: "Too much caution and too little lust squeze much of the dramatic juice".
I don't get the sense that this is the type of film Oscar likes, based on what I've read about it.