User:ShannonHegedus/Lust,Caution

Soundtrack
The music for Lust, Caution created by French composer Alexandre Michel Gérard Desplat. The soundtrack, which was released by Decca Records, contains 24 songs running at approximately 60 minutes in length.

Sexuality
In Ang Lee's Lust, Caution Chia Chi’s virginity is used as a symbol of both her status as an innocent woman and a barrier to the role she must play in order to prove her patriotism. Chia Chi’s virginity is ultimately given as a sacrifice but consequently, her sexuality that has been awakened is used as a weapon against Mr. Yee in order to ensnare him into a relationship.

The portrayal of female sexuality and desire in the film emphasizes the shame and awkwardness of Chia Chi's sexuality vs. the role she must play as "Mrs. Mai", which serves the nation rather than her own individual needs as a woman. Sex and sexuality are used as tangible tools in proving patriotism in this film, and in each instance of Chia Chi's bodily sacrifice, she is representing the recognizable symbol of violation experienced by China as a nation while under Japanese occupation

Through each of the explicit sex scenes, a tangible but subtle difference can be felt in Chia Chi Wang's character as she is becoming more comfortable with her sexual desires; a gradual acceptance of pleasure along with a growing role of dominance in hers and Mr. Yee's sexual relationship as compared to the submissive and easily manipulated role she fills in the group of comrades that she is plotting against the Japanese and their colluders with.

Eileen Chang's original work from which Ang is drawing from does not contain the three noteworthy sex scenes of the film, yet with their addition a change can be seen in the levels of participation and assertiveness from Chia Chi [5] and her own agency in them: the first explicit sex scene focuses on the forced and unpleasant intercourse between the couple, stronger levels of consent and enjoyment from Chia Chi is found in the second sex scene, and finally, in the third sex scene, Chia Chi has recognized her full agency and pleasure and is acting assertively [5] and taking control of her own desires and pleasure with Mr. Yee.

Positive Reception
Audiences across Taiwan received the premiere of Lust, Caution with excitement both due to the pride of director Ang Lee hailing from Taiwan, and for the many international awards from its time on the film festival circuit. The mainstream media in Taiwan built up an enormous amount of anticipation and fever for the world premiere of Lust, Caution with a continuous gossip channel focused on the explicit and controversial portrayal of sexuality, which seemed to indicate to the positive, or at least curious reception of the film. Much of the positive reception that Lust, Caution found in Taiwan was based on the assertion that the film was an accurate portrayal of the first generation Taiwanese who were against Chinese occupation.

Controversies
Due to the graphic and explicit sexual content and nudity in Lust, Caution, Reception in the United States brought critique from The Women Film Critics Circle (WFCC), which decried Ang Lee’s adaptation as a “Hall of Shame” film which glorifies the torturous Stockholm syndrome-like relationship between Wong Chia Chi’s “Mrs. Mai” and her colluding lover/target Mr. Yee.

The sexual violence that Chia Chi experiences from the men in Ang Lee's film adaptation of Lust, Caution is not explicitly described or outlined in the original novella written by Eileen Chang, rather the unspoken violence that is experienced is a representation of the everyday and intrusive violence felt by those living under colonial occupation.

In contrast to the strict NC-17 rating that this film received from the Motion Picture Association film rating system for it's North American box office release and due to the "hot sex" prominently featured, Lust, Caution faced obstacles for it's release in Mainland China, due to the lack of a film rating system there.

In a further example of censorship applied to the Mainland China release the line in which Chia Chi whispers "Go, go quickly" to the Japanese collaborator that she has fallen in love with in order to save him from capture and death; in the edited version, Ang Lee changes this to "Let's go" in order to redeem the lead protagonist's sabotage of the assassination attempt of Mr. Yee by implicating them both in the escape rather than Chia Chi sacrificing herself and her classmates alone. This form of censorship was done in oder to avoid criticism for glorifying a traitor such as Mr. Yee during a time of Japanese occupation in World War II. Chia Chi's betrayal of her classmates and China as a nation in order to save a traitor was received by some Mainland Chinese audiences with distaste, with some media websites referring to the film as an insult to China.